NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTBattlefield 3
Our final action game of our benchmark suite is Battlefield 3, DICE’s 2011 multiplayer military shooter. Its ability to pose a significant challenge to GPUs has been dulled some by time and drivers, but it’s still a challenge if you want to hit the highest settings at the highest resolutions at the highest anti-aliasing levels. Furthermore while we can crack 60fps in single player mode, our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, so hitting high framerates here may not be high enough.
AMD and NVIDIA have gone back and forth in this game over the past year, and as of late NVIDIA has held a very slight edge with the GTX 680. That means Titan has ample opportunity to push well past the 7970GE, besting AMD’s single-GPU contender by 52% at 2560. Even the GTX 680 is left well behind, with Titan clearing it by 48%.
This is enough to get Titan to 74fps at 2560 with 4xMSAA, which is just fast enough to make BF3 playable at those settings with a single GPU. Otherwise by the time we drop to 1920, even the 120Hz gamers should be relatively satisfied.
Moving on, as always multi-GPU cards end up being faster, but not necessarily immensely so. 22% for the GTX 690 and just 12% for the 7990 are smaller leads than we’ve seen elsewhere.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
337 Comments
View All Comments
chizow - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
You must not have followed the development of GPUs, and particularly flagship GPUs very closely in the last decade or so.G80, the first "Compute GPGPU" as Nvidia put it, was first and foremost a graphics part and a kickass one at that. Each flagship GPU after, GT200, GT200b, GF100, GF110 have continued in this vein...driven by the desktop graphics market first, Tesla/compute market second. Hell, the Tesla business did not even exist until the GeForceTesla200. Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, even got on stage likening his GPUs to superheroes with day jobs as graphics cards while transforming into supercomputers at night.
Now Nvidia flips the script, holds back the flagship GPU from the gaming market that *MADE IT POSSIBLE* and wants to charge you $1K because it's got "SuperComputer Guts"??? That's bait and switch, stab in the back, whatever you want to call it. So yes, if you were actually in this market before, Nvidia has screwed you over to the tune of $1K for something that used to cost $500-$650 max.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
You only spend at max $360 for a video card as you stated, so this doesn't affect you and you haven't been screwed.Grow up crybaby. A company may chagre what it desires, and since you're never buying, who cares how many times you scream they screwed everyone ?
NO ONE CARES, not even you, since you never even pony up $500, as you yourself stated in this long, continuous crybaby whine you made here, and have been making, since the 680 was released, or rather, since Charlie fried your brain with his propaganda.
Go get your 98 cent a gallon gasoline while you're at it , you fool.
chizow - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Uh no, I've spent over $1K in a single GPU purchasing transaction, have you? I didn't think so.I'm just unwilling to spend *$2K* for what cost $1K in the past for less than the expected increase in performance. I spent $700 this round instead of the usual $1K because that's all I was willing to pay for a mid-range ASIC in GK104 and while it was still a significant upgrade to my last set of $1K worth of graphics cards, I wasn't going to plunk down $1K for a set of mid-range GK104 GTX 680s.
It's obvious you have never bought in this range of GPUs in the past, otherwise you wouldn't be posting such retarded replys for what is clearly usurious pricing by Nvidia.
Now go away, idiot.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - link
Wrong again, as usual.So what it boils down to is you're a cheapskate, still disgruntled, still believe in Charlie D's lie, and are angry you won't have the current top card at a price you demand.
I saw your whole griping list in the other thread too, but none of what you purchase or don't purchase makes a single but of difference when it comes to your insane tinfoil hat lies that you have used for your entire argument
Once again, pretending you aren't aware of production capacity leaves you right where you brainless rant started a long time ago.
You cover your tracks whining about ATI's initial price, which wasn't out of line either, and ignore nVidia's immediate crushing of it when the 680 came out, as you still complained about the performance increase there. You're a crybaby, that's it.
That's what you have done now for months on end, whined and whined and whined, and got caught over and over in exaggerations and lies, demanding a perfectly increasing price perf line slanting upwards, for years on end, lying about it's past, which I caught you on in the earlier reviews.
Well dummy, that's not how performance/price increases work in any area of computer parts, anyway.
Glad you're just another freaking parrot, as the reviewers have trained you fools to automaton levels.
Pontius - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
My only interest at the moment is OpenCL compute performance. Sad to see it's not working at the moment, but once they get the kinks worked out, I would really love to see some benchmarks.Also, as any GPGPU programmer knows, the number one bottleneck for GPU computing is randomly accessing memory. If you are working only within the on-chip local memory, then yes, you get blazingly fast speeds on a GPU. However, the second you do something as simple as a += on a global memory location, your performance grinds to a screeching halt. I would really like to see the performance of these cards on random memory heavy OpenCL benchmarks. Thanks for the review!
codedivine - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
We may do this in the future if I get some time off from univ work. Stay tuned :)Pontius - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Thanks codedevine, I'll keep an eye out.Pontius - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
My only interest at the moment is OpenCL compute performance. Sad to see it's not working at the moment, but once they get the kinks worked out, I would really love to see some benchmarks.Also, as any GPGPU programmer knows, the number one bottleneck for GPU computing is randomly accessing memory. If you are working only within the on-chip local memory, then yes, you get blazingly fast speeds on a GPU. However, the second you do something as simple as a += on a global memory location, your performance grinds to a screeching halt. I would really like to see the performance of these cards on random memory heavy OpenCL benchmarks. Thanks for the review!
Bat123Man - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
The Titan is nothing more than a proof-of-concept; "Look what we can do! Whohoo! Souped up to the max!" Nvidia is not intending this card to be for everyone. They know it will be picked up by a few well-moneyed enthusiasts, but it is really just a science project so that when people think about "the fastest GPU on the market", they think Nvidia.How often do you guys buy the best of the best as soon as it is out the door anyway ? $1000, $2000, it makes no difference, most of us wouldn't buy it even at 500 bucks. This is all about bragging rights, pure and simple.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Not exactly. The chip isn't fully enabled.