NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTSleeping Dogs
Another Square Enix game, Sleeping Dogs is one of the few open world games to be released with any kind of benchmark, giving us a unique opportunity to benchmark an open world game. Like most console ports, Sleeping Dogs’ base assets are not extremely demanding, but it makes up for it with its interesting anti-aliasing implementation, a mix of FXAA and SSAA that at its highest settings does an impeccable job of removing jaggies. However by effectively rendering the game world multiple times over, it can also require a very powerful video card to drive these high AA modes.
Sleeping Dogs is another game that AMD cards have done rather well at, leaving the GTX 680 quite a way behind. The sheer increase in functional units for Titan means it has no problem vaulting back to the top of the list of single GPU cards, but it also means it’s crossing a sizable gap.
In the end, at 2560 at the High (second-highest) AA settings, Titan is just shy of 50% faster than the GTX 680, but a weaker 17% ahead of the 7970GE. As we drop in resolution/AA, so does Titan’s lead, as the game shifts to being CPU limited.
Notably, no single card is really good enough here for 2560 with Extreme AA, with even Titan only hitting 35fps. This is one of the only games where even with a single monitor there’s real potential for a second Titan card in SLI.
Meanwhile the gap between Titan and our dual-GPU cards is roughly as expected. The GTX 690 takes a smaller lead at 18%, while the 7990 is some 42% ahead.
Due to its built-in benchmark, Sleeping Dogs is also another title that is a good candidate for repeatable and consistent minimum framerate testing.
While on average Titan is faster than the 7970GE, the minimum framerates put Titan in a rough spot. At 2560 with high AA Titan is effectively tied with the 7970GE, and with extreme AA it actually falls behind. It’s not readily apparent why this is, whether it’s some kind of general SSAA bottleneck or if there’s something else going on. But it’s a reminder that at its very worst, Titan can only match the 7970GE.
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CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - link
ROFL another amd fanboy having a blowout. Mommie will be down to the basement with the bar of soap, don't wet your pants.When amd dies your drivers will still suck, badly.
trajan2448 - Saturday, March 16, 2013 - link
Until you guys start showing latencies, these reviews based primarily on fps numbers don't tell the whole story. Titan is 4x faster than multi GPU solutions in real rendering.IUU - Wednesday, March 20, 2013 - link
Just a thought: if they price titan say at 700 or 500 (that was the old price point for flagship cards), how on earth will they market game consoles, and the brave "new" world of the mobile "revolution"?Like it or not, high tech companies have found a convenient way to get away from the cutthroat competition of the pc-land(from there their hate and slogans like post-pc and the rest) and get a breath of fresh(money) air!
Whether this is also good for the consumer in the long run, remains to be seen, but the fact is, we will pay more to get less, unless something unexpected happens.
paul_59 - Saturday, June 15, 2013 - link
I would appreciate any intelligent opinions on the merits of buying a 690 card versus a Titan, considering they retail for the same pricebravegag - Tuesday, August 13, 2013 - link
I have bought the EVGA nVidia GTX Titan, actually two of them instead of the Tesla K20 thanks to the benchmark results posted in this article. However, the performance results I got are nowhere close to the ones shown here. Running DGEMM from CUDA 5.5 and CUBLAS example matrixMulCUBLAS with my EVGA nVidia GTX Titan reaches no more than 220 GFlop/s which is nowhere close to 1 TFlop/s. My question is then, are the results presented here a total fake?I created the following project where some additional HPC benchmarks of the nVidia GTX Titan are included, the benchmark computing environment is also detailed there:
https://github.com/bravegag/eigen-magma-benchmark
bravegag - Wednesday, August 14, 2013 - link
have anyone tried replicating the benchmark results shown here? how did it go?Tunnah - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
It feels nVidia are just taking the pee out of us now. I was semi-miffed at the 970 controversy, I know for business reasons etc. it doesn't make sense to truly trounce the competition (and your own products) when you can instead hold something back and keep it tighter, and have something to release in case they surprise you.And I was semi-miffed when I heard it would be more like a 33% improvement over the current cream of the crop, instead of the closer to 50% increase the Titan was over the 680, because they have to worry about the 390x, and leave room for a Titan X White Y Grey SuperHappyTime version.
But to still charge $1000 even though they are keeping the DP performance low, this is just too far. The whole reasoning for the high price tag was you were getting a card that was not only a beast of a gaming card, but it would hold its own as a workstation card too, as long as you didn't need the full Quadro service. Now it is nothing more than a high end card, a halo product...that isn't actually that good!
When it comes down to it, you're paying 250% the cost for 33% more performance, and that is disgusting. Don't even bring RAM into it, it's not only super cheap and in no way a justification for the cost, but in fact is useless, because NO GAMER WILL EVER NEED THAT MUCH, IT WAS THE FLIM FLAMMING WORKSTATION CROWD WHO NEEDING THAT FLIM FLAMMING AMOUNT OF FLOOMING RAM YOU FLUPPERS!
This feels like a big juicy gob of spit in our faces. I know most people bought these purely for the gaming option and didn't use the DP capability, but that's not the point - it was WORTH the $999 price tag. This simply is not, not in the slightest. $650, $750 tops because it's the best, after all..but $999 ? Not in this lifetime.
I've not had an AMD card since way back in the days of ATi, I am well and truly part of the nVidia crowd, even when they had a better card I'd wait for the green team reply. But this is actually insulting to consumers.
I was never gonna buy one of these, I was waiting on the 980Ti for the 384bit bus and the bumps that come along with it...but now I'm not only hoping the 390x is better than people say because then nVidia will have to make it extra good..I'm hoping it's better than they say so I can actually buy it.
For shame nVidia, what you're doing with this card is unforgivable