NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTDiRT: Showdown
Racing to the front of our 2013 list will be our racing benchmark, DiRT: Showdown. DiRT: Showdown is based on the latest iteration of Codemasters’ EGO engine, which has continually evolved over the years to add more advanced rendering features. It was one of the first games to implement tessellation, and also one of the first games to implement a DirectCompute based forward-rendering compatible lighting system. At the same time as Codemasters is by far the most prevalent PC racing developers, it’s also a good proxy for some of the other racing games on the market like F1 and GRID.
DiRT: Showdown is something of a divisive game for benchmarking. The game’s advanced lighting system, while not developed by AMD, does implement a lot of the key concepts they popularized with their Leo forward lighting tech demo. As a result performance with that lighting system turned on has been known to greatly favor AMD cards. With that said, since we’re looking at high-end cards there’s really little reason not to be testing with it turned on since even a slow card can keep up. That said, this is why we also test DiRT with advanced lighting both on and off starting at 1920x1080 Ultra.
The end result is perhaps unsurprising in that NVIDIA already starts with a large deficit with the GTX 680 versus AMD’s Radeon cards. Titan closes the gap and is enough to surpass the 7970GE at every resolution except 5760, but just barely. This is the one game like this and as a result I don’t put a ton of stock into these results on a global level, but I thought it would make for an interesting look none the less.
This also settles some speculation of whether DiRT and its compute-heavy lighting system would benefit from the compute performance improvements Titan brings to the table. The answer to that is yes, but only by roughly as much as the increase in theoretical compute performance over GTX 680. We’re not seeing any kind of performance increase that could be attributed to improved compute efficiency here, which is why Titan can only just beat the 7970GE at 2560 here. However the jury is still out on whether this means that DiRT’s lighting algorithm doesn’t map well to Kepler period, or if it’s an implementation issue. We also saw some unexpected weak DirectCompute performance out of Titan with our SystemCompute benchmark, so this may be further evidence that DirectCompute isn’t currently taking full advantage of everything Titan offers.
In any case, at 2560 Titan is roughly 47% faster than the GTX 680 and all of 3% faster than the 7970GE. It’s enough to get Titan above the 60fps mark here, but at 5760 no single GPU, not even GK110, can get you 60fps. On the other hand, the equivalent AMD dual-GPU products, the 7970GECF and the 7990, have no such trouble. Dual-GPU cards will consistently win, but generally not like this.
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CeriseCogburn - Monday, March 4, 2013 - link
That's all you've got ?Did you at least look at the links, or have a failed brainfart of an idea for a rebuttal ?
No, of course you did not. Another mindless, insulting fool, without a single anything other than of course, and insult.
I would feel better about agreeing with you if you had any facts or even an opinion on anything else.
swing848 - Friday, May 17, 2013 - link
I believe the review was for gaming machines. In that regard HD 7970s and GTX 680s trade blows as one card is faster in some games and the other faster in some games.So, gamers should pick a card that will perform the best for the games they play.
Microsoft FSX is very old now, yet a person needs a very powerful gaming computer to run it with all of the goodies turned up [with lots of code fixes], including overclocking an Ivy Bridge to 4.5GHz+ [this is because when the game was developed it was believed that Moore's Law was valid and single core CPUs would be running at 10GHz by 2012]. And, yes, FSX was coded for NVIDIA.
coilpower - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Well that is where nvidia's attempted marketing falls apart. Compute in their flagship gpu brought to geforce lineup is nothing new. Now they think they can go $1000 on it, doubling the price.Techpowerup was apt when they said this is the most overpriced video card in 25 years.
Nvidia has dropped the ball here on the price, heck, they have thrown it down the street. Too bad, now they will lose more face with the price drops needed to get these off shelves.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
They're sold out, already.So much for you being correct, you're already an incorrect failure.
Nice try amd fansvengaliboy
Alucard291 - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
All 100 of them? :)CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - link
You forgot the k fool.Alucard291 - Friday, March 8, 2013 - link
Proof? :)In any case, please stop shitposting. This is not 4chan or engadget.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - link
They're still sold out, ROFL.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
From Anand Brain etc in the current article: " 12:16PM EDT - GK110 in general seems to be supply constrained right now. NVIDIA has previously told us they're selling every Tesla K20 and Titan card they can make""Thank you Cerise, I'm sorry, I Alutard291 was wrong, and you are right. I challenged you and lost miserably. In the future I will shut my lying piehole and learn from you, Cerise, instead."
LOL - No you won't Alutard, you will never be correct.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
$4500 from appreciative clients, or a grand from whining disgruntled crybabies ?Hmmm... what should a company do... ?
http://www.excaliberpc.com/622885/nvidia-tesla-k20...
I think they should take the extra $3500, and let the crybabies squeal and wail and fill their diapers.