NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTFar Cry 3
The final new game added to the latest rendition of our benchmark suite is Far Cry 3, Ubisoft’s recently released island-jungle action game. A lot like our other jungle game Crysis, Far Cry 3 can be quite tough on GPUs, especially with MSAA and improved alpha-to-coverage checking thrown into the mix. On the other hand it’s still a bit of a pig on the CPU side, and seemingly inexplicably we’ve found that it doesn’t play well with HyperThreading on our testbed, making this the only game we’ve ever had to disable HT for to maximize our framerates.
For the 7970GE and GTX 680, FC3 at 2560 was already a very close match. Or put another way, with the 7970GE and GTX 680 tied up with each other, Titan is free to clear the both of them by approximately 35% each at 2560. This is enough to launch Titan past the 60fps mark, the first for any single-GPU card.
As for our other resolutions, it’s interesting to note that the gains at both 5760 and 1920 with MSAA are actually greater than at 2560. As we mentioned before Far Cry is somewhat demanding on the CPU side of things, so Titan may not be fully stretching out at 2560. In which case the performance gains due to Titan would be closer to 45-50%.
Moving on to our multi-GPU cards, this is something of a mixed bag. Titan isn’t close to winning, but GTX 690 wins by under 30%, and 7990 by just 17%. This is despite the fact that SLI/CF scaling is as strong as it is. At the same time Far Cry 3 is a good contemporary reminder of just what Titan can excel at: had Titan been out in 2012, it would have been doing roughly this well while NVIDIA would have still been hammering out their SLI profiles for this game. Multi-GPU cards are powerful, but they are forever reliant on waiting for profiles to unlock their capabilities.
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chizow - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link
Sorry Ryan but that's a bit of a cop-out exuse imo. Anyone who can fork out $1K for a few GPUs in SLI should be able to figure out how to google SLI bits and enter them into Nvidia Inspector. They are "enthusiasts" afterall, right?SLI working on launch day with proper SLI bits:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1334390/how-to-get-prop...
Nvidia is usually pretty good about updating these bits or launching optimized drivers ahead of a big game launch, but sometimes they are a few days behind. The same can be said for single-GPU performance optimizations, but obviously less frequently than SLI.
With few exceptions over the course of my 5 year run with SLI, I've been able to get SLI working on Day 1 for most major game launches. AA is more hit or miss, but generally with Nvidia you don't have to wait for updates if you know how to manipulate SLI/AA bits (or use google).
In any case, I think Titan has created a new paradigm that may need to be addressed, where 2 performance parts are going to be preferable over a single GPU, when those 2 parts in CF/SLI offer 150% of the performance at 75% of the price.
Veteranv2 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
And that is a subjective view. Not objective.You don't have 1 graph where you prove dual GPU's are inconsistent. You don't prove your point, you just bring up a subjective view defending a 1000$ card which is crap compared to best offer from AMD...
ronin22 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Haters gonna hate.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
liars gonna liehttp://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA...
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
here's a chart showing how amd fails utterly...http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA...
Have fun amd fanboy, the lies you live by are now exposed.
Veteranv2 - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link
Same comment for you:Wow, you base your opinion on 1 game on a point that 1 review site has made without knowing that the FRAPS software measures correctly and that drivers are good with that game?
Wow, that blows my mind. How dumb can be people be?
This is the same like saying, wow this 1 musquito didn't give me malaria, malaria doesn't exist....
I am not a fanboy, except for my wallet and honesty.
Anandtech makes a point which it does not prove. That is my point. Hence if you cannot prove a point, but still make it, that makes you subjective. So either prove it, or shut up about it and be objective.
veppers - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
I'm not sure you should be calling anyone out for being a fanboy when your childish pro-Nvidia posts are here for all to see. (happy Nvidia customer here just incase you wanted to go there)Also, how many times are you going to spam that same link?
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
As many times as the lying whiners pull their stupid crap.It should be spammed about 300 times in all the articles here since the Jan 2012 release of the amd failship 79xx, shouldn't it ?
Hello amd fanboy.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - link
" SLI profiles for optimum scaling, NVIDIA has done a very good job here in the past, and out of the 19 games in our test suite, SLI only fails in F1 2012. Compare that to 6 out of 19 failed titles with AMD CrossFire. "http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_...
LOL - yes you sure know what you're talking about...
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Take a look at HOW CRAP amd dual top end card setups actually are and how FRAPS, which this site regularly uses has been SCREWING nVidia for years...http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA...
Enjoy the years of lies you have swallowed whole, while sentient human beings like myself have warned against.