NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTTotal War: Shogun 2
Our next benchmark is Shogun 2, which is a returning favorite to our benchmark suite. Total War: Shogun 2 is the latest installment of the long-running Total War series of turn based strategy games, and alongside Civilization V is notable for just how many units it can put on a screen at once. Even 2 years after its release it’s still a very punishing game at its highest settings due to the amount of shading and memory those units require.
Shogun has us seeing one of Titan’s best games almost right away. The 50% performance gain over the GTX 680 at 2560 almost exactly mirrors Titan’s 50% increase in memory bandwidth, which given the game’s nature as a memory eater shouldn’t come as too great a surprise. In this case it’s enough to push Titan to nearly 60fps at 2560 even with everything cranked up, or a bit past 30fps at 5760.
This happened to be a game the GTX 680 was already doing modestly well at relative to AMD’s cards, so the Titan/7970GE matchup is even more lopsided, with Titan surpassing the 7970GE by over 60% at 2560. It’s not entirely clear what Shogun is doing that favors Kepler over GCN so much, but the result is the single biggest performance gap we’ll see all day.
Moving on to the dual GPU cards however, we are reminded that for raw framerates a dual-GPU card can almost never be beat. Titan is effectively tied with the 7990, but the GTX 690 and the multi-card configurations surpass it by at least 17%. As we’ve stated before, Titan’s forte will not be raw framerates, but rather slightly lower framerates without the pitfalls of SLI/CF. The only thing that’s really being determined here is how big this gap will be.
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Alucard291 - Friday, March 8, 2013 - link
And once again you spew your b/s out of every orifice.But you still haven't said why you think your walls of nonsense make any difference :)
To 4chan with ya
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
You people literally are pathetic. Right now, the cheapest gtx 670 is $720 sli, right ?Get your sli motherboard, get ready for extra heat, a better PS ( already stated botiques are launching these with 450W PS.
So how many months after 670 launch with reduced prices are you only 25% off the single fastest video card in the world, while you take the cheapest version you can find ?
You people are seriously filling your diapers at an unbelievable rate.
I'll note once again for all you fools who continuously missed it, and still do, because of course, your gigantic flapping lips wraped around the gourd so many times they sealed off oxygen flow to the brain that you not only don't want to face reality, but choose not to on purpose:
There was a manufacturing shortage for die space in Jan 2012 when 79xx did a near paper launch. Availability for that card was short till a day before the small in comparison 680 die hit the shelves far over half a year later, and the SINGLE factory in the entire world for production was busily building out well over 2 BILLION in emergency production space desperately trying to keep up with bare minimum demands.
THERE WAS NO CAPACITY to produce a 7.1B transistor chip. The design of the chips follows a very slow SEVERAL YEAR slog, and even now, yield on the most complex chip ever is no doubt too low for comfort, and far too low to have been "launched" WHEN YOU IDIOT TIN FOIL HAT WEARING CHARLIE D BUTT KISSING MIND SLAVE FOOLS claim the conspiracy against all gamers was undertaken by "the greedy nVidia".
You people suck.
ronin22 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Common, stupid..If you are expecting a gaming card, go buy your AMD whatever.
The real magic of Titan is its compute power.
You were stupid to expect anything else from a GK110
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Good to know amd absolutely failed to produce a top end videocard and has stuck all you tards with their only release, a mid range, at $579+ in comparison.
Be a mid ranger, buy amds flagship, the half mast loser card mid range.
piiman - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Come on it's priced , for now, for the Geeks that have to have the biggest most bad ass card out. It will come down once those suckers...oops I mean enthusiast are sucked dry. :-)CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Since amd is a sucked dry shriveling corpse (excellent fanboy mistreatment by the tightwad whining poorboy amd penny pinching freaks), your theory, if we give a single deformed brain cell of credit to the amd fanboys, when they wail without amd everything will be a thousand bucks, may not pan out.AMD is dying, and when gone, a thousand bucks will be standard, right all you amd fanboys ?
Start getting used to it.
L O L
atlr - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Agreed. I was hoping for an initial price somewhat proportional to the performance like US$700. Perhaps ebay will be flooded with enough 680's and 690's from the early 'ticket' buyers which will cause retail prices of the same to drop.wongwarren - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Guess you guys didn't read the article properly:With a price of $999 Titan is decided out of the price/performance race; Titan will be a luxury product, geared towards a mix of low-end compute customers and ultra-enthusiasts who can justify buying a luxury product to get their hands on a GK110 video card.
Alucard291 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Wait wait wait, a GPU is now a luxury product?There was me thinking that all pc components have long since become commodities...
JeffFlanagan - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
I agree that talk of a luxury GPU seems odd. Is there any game that will actually look better with this card rather than a $400 card?It may allow the user to up the resolution, but is anyone even shipping textures with detail beyond 1080p these days?
I haven't bought a video card in several years, and can still select Ultra settings on new games at 1080p.