NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTSynthetics
As always we’ll also take a quick look at synthetic performance to get a better look at Titan’s underpinnings. These tests are mostly for comparing cards from within a manufacturer, as opposed to directly comparing AMD and NVIDIA cards. We’ll start with 3DMark Vantage’s Pixel Fill test.
Pixel fill is a mix of a ROP test and a test to see if you have enough bandwidth to feed those ROPs. At the same time the smallest increase in theoretical performance for Titan over GTX 680 was in ROP performance, where a 50% increase in ROPs was met with a minor clockspeed reduction for a final increase in ROP performance of 25%.
The end result is that with gains of 28%, Titan’s lead over GTX 680 is just a hair more than its increase in theoretical ROP performance. Consequently at first glance it looks like Titan has enough memory and cache bandwidth to feed its 48 ROPs, which given where we’re at today with GDDR5 is good news as GDDR5 has very nearly run out of room.
Moving on, we have our 3DMark Vantage texture fillrate test, which does for texels and texture mapping units what the previous test does for ROPs.
Oddly enough, despite the fact that Titan’s texture performance improvements over GTX 680 were only on the range of 46%, here Titan is measured as having 62% more texturing performance. This may be how Titan is interplaying with its improved bandwidth, or it may be a case where some of the ancillary changes NVIDIA made to the texture paths for compute are somehow also beneficial to proper texturing performance.
Finally we’ll take a quick look at tessellation performance with TessMark.
Unsurprisingly, Titan is well ahead of anything else NVIDIA produces. At 49% faster it’s just a bit over the 46% theoretical performance improvement we would expect from the increased number of Polymorph Engines the extra 6 SMXes bring. Interestingly, as fast as GTX 580’s tessellation performance was, these results would indicate that Titan offers more than a generational jump in tessellation performance, nearly tripling GTX 580’s tessellation performance. Though at this time it’s not at all clear just what such tessellation performance is good for, as we seem to be reaching increasingly ridiculous levels.
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CeriseCogburn - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
He's the jerk off liar you sucked up whole bud.chizow - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
At least he can put together a coherent sentence but compared to you, he looks like a saint.CeriseCogburn - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
you're his little altar boy, you should knowchizow - Monday, February 25, 2013 - link
Sounds like suppressed scars and emotions from a troubled past, you should see someone about that, can't be healthy for you. Might result in lashing out uncontrollably in public ...oh wait.CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - link
LOL - The big hate filled price crybaby conspiracist, lashing out for near a year now, the OWS mirror must be extremely painful.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
The crybaby fool liar amd fanboy has nothing else to offer but the exemplary issuing of brainfarts on a most regular basis, despite the corrections attempted by other for years on end.Forget the facts, the raging amd fanboy is blissful, but does not mean a word they say, either, and will never follow through.
A dry empty, stupid threat of nothing.
One can only hope the idiots grasp tightly on the rump cheeks of amd and never let go, thus when it falls into gehennna precious fanbioy will be gone with it too.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
They don't need your money they've got BILLIONS.AMD needs your money red fanboy, but then you don't have any to give them, as the amd fanboy tightwads have proven, they can destroy their own favorite company with their constant demand for free and cheap.
We don't want crybaby loser tightwads like you supporting nVidia. Your company is the in debt failing and fired amd. Enjoy the ghetto.
CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, February 27, 2013 - link
So nVidia is pulling in about 10% profit in the video card area, as recent and past years show.
So how exactly is that greed ? This whole past year of 600 series left them with that same pathetic profit margin.
They charge ten percent over their costs on average. Ten percent.
You people are obviously rage filled hate bots without a clue. Ten percent is not some unreasonable scalp price.
UzairH - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
I am upgrading shortly, and for me Skyrim is a big deal when it comes to graphics performance. Vanilla Skyrim plays great on GTX 580/HD 7850 and up, but one can load a dozen hi-res texture mods and high-quality ENB mod on top of Skyrim ot make it look an order of magnitude better than vanilla Skyrim, with a consequent massive performance drop. Skyrim is also a game that does not do SLI/Crossfire well,. so it would be interesting to see what a single powerful GPU can do in it.Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
We've tested Skyrim with the high res texture pack and it's still CPU bound on high-end video cards. As for mods, as a matter of editorial policy we do not include mods in our testing due to the very frequent changes and relatively small user base.