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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
337 Comments
View All Comments
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.