NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTCrysis: Warhead
Up next is our legacy title for 2013, Crysis: Warhead. The stand-alone expansion to 2007’s Crysis, at over 4 years old Crysis: Warhead can still beat most systems down. Crysis was intended to be future-looking as far as performance and visual quality goes, and it has clearly achieved that. We’ve only finally reached the point where single-GPU cards have come out that can hit 60fps at 1920 with 4xAA.
At 2560 we still have a bit of a distance to go before any single-GPU card can crack 60fps. In lieu of that Titan is the winner as expected. Leading the GTX 680 by 54%, this is Titan’s single biggest win over its predecessor, actually exceeding the theoretical performance advantage based on the increase in functional units alone. For some reason GTX 680 never did gain much in the way of performance here versus the GTX 580, and while it’s hard to argue that Titan has reversed that, it has at least corrected some of the problem in order to push more than 50% out.
In the meantime, with GTX 680’s languid performance, this has been a game the latest Radeon cards have regularly cleared. For whatever reason they’re a good match for Crysis, meaning even with all its brawn, Titan can only clear the 7970GE by 21%.
On the other hand, our multi-GPU cards are a mixed bag. Once more Titan loses to both, but the GTX 690 only leads by 15% thanks to GK104’s aforementioned weak Crysis performance. Meanwhile the 7990 takes a larger lead at 33%.
I’d also note that we’ve thrown in a “bonus round” here just to see when Crysis will be playable at 1080p with its highest settings and with 4x SSAA for that picture-perfect experience. As it stands AMD multi-GPU cards can already cross 60fps, but for everything else we’re probably a generation off yet before Crysis is completely and utterly conquered.
Moving on, we once again have minimum framerates for Crysis.
When it comes to Titan, the relative improvement in minimum framerates over GTX 680 is nothing short of obscene. Whatever it was that was holding back GTX 680 is clearly having a hard time slowing down Titan, leading to Titan offering 71% better minimum framerates. There’s clearly much more going on here than just an increase in function units.
Meanwhile, though Titan’s gains here over the 7970GE aren’t quite as high as they were with the GTX 680, the lead over the 7970GE still grows a bit to 26%. As for our mutli-GPU cards, this appears to be a case where SLI is struggling; the GTX 690 is barely faster than Titan here. Though at 31% faster than Titan, the 7990 doesn’t seem to be faltering much.
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UzairH - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Ah ok, thanks for the explanation Ryan. Fair enough if the game is CPU bound, and your policy sounds fair as well. Please note however that at high resolutions enabling SSAO kills the performance, and enabling Transparency Anti-aliasing on top of that even more so, so even without mods Skyrim can still be pretty brutal on cards like the 670 and HD 7970.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
LOL ignore the idiocy and buy the great nVidia card, you'll NEVER have to hear another years long screed from amd fanboys about 3G of ram being future-proof -ESPECIALLY WITH SKYRIM AND ADDONS!!!!As they screamed endlessly....
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
It's a bunch of HOOEY no matter how reasonable "the policy" excuse sounds...http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2013/02/21/nvidia...
There's the Skyrim results, with TITAN 40+% ahead.
trajan2448 - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link
AMDs fps numbers are overstated. They figured out a trick to make runt frames, or frames which are not actually rendered to trigger the fps monitor as a real fully rendered frame. This is real problem for AMD much worse than the latency problem. Crossfire is a disaster which is why numerous reviewers including Tech Report have written that Crossfire produces higher fps but feels less smooth than Nvidia.Check this article out. http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA...
Ankarah - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
From a regular consumer's point of view, the hype it being the fastest 'single' graphics card doesn't really appeal that much - it doesn't make a difference to me how these video cards work in what configurations underneath its big case, as long as it does its job.So I really can't understand why any regular consumer would intentionally choose this over the 690GTX, which seems to be faster overall for the same price, unless you belong to perhaps 0.5% of their market share where you absolutely require FP64 executions for your work but don't really need the full power of Tesla.
And let's face it, if you are willing to shell out a grand for your graphics card for your PC, you aren't worried about the difference their TDP will make on your electric bills.
So I think it's just a marketing circus specifically engineered to draw in a lucky few, to whom money or price/performance ratio holds no value at all - there's nothing to see here for regular Joes like you and me.
Let's move along.
sherlockwing - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
This card is for people willing to spend at least $2K on their Graphic cards and don't want to deal with Quad GPU scaling while also having room for a Third. If you don't have that much cash you are not in its target audience.Ankarah - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
That makes sense,so this card, however we slice it, is only for about perhaps 1% of the consumer base if even that.
andrewaggb - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
pretty much. And bragging rights.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
not for the crybabies we have here.Yet go to another thread and the screaming about the 7990 and the endless dual top end videocard setups with thousand dollar INTEL cpu's will be endless.
It all depends on whose diapers the pooing crybabies are soiling at the moment.
cmdrdredd - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Plus people who want to break world records in benchmarking.