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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piiman - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Yes a $1000.00 GPU is a luxury. Don't want luxury use the on board GPU and have a blast! :-)CeriseCogburn - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
ANY GPU over about $100 to $150 bucks is a LUXURY PRODUCT.Of course we can get you a brand spankin new gpu for $20 after rebate DX11 capable with a gig of ram, GTX 600 series, ready to rock out, even fit in your HTPC.
So stop playing so stupid and so ridiculous. Why is stupidity so cool and so popular with you puke brains ?
A hundred bucks can get one a very reasonable GPU that will play everything now available with a quite tolerable eye candy pain level, so the point is dummy, THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF NON LUXURY GPU's, JUST LIKE THERE ARE ALWAYS A FEW DOZEN LUXURY GPU's.
So your faux aghast smarmy idiot comment about I thought GPU's were commodities fits right in with the retard liar shortbus so stuffed to the brim with the clowns we have here.
You're welcome, I'm certain that helped.
Ankarah - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Could then you care to explain why any of those ultra enthusiasts would choose this card over the 690GTX, which seems to be faster overall?And let's leave the power consumption between the two out of this discussion - if you can drop a grand on your graphics card for your PC, then you can afford a big power supply too.
sherlockwing - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
You haven't seen the SLI benches yet.This card in SLI will perform better than GTX 690 in SLI due to bad scaling for Quad SLI.
sherlockwing - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Correction: It will be better than GTX 690 SLI if you overclock the Titan to 1Ghz, 690 don't really have that much OC headroom.CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
did you say overclock ?" In our testing, NVIDIA’s GK110 core had no issue hitting a Boost Clock of 1162MHz but hit right into the Power Limit, despite it being set at 106%. Memory was also ready to overclock and hit a speed of 6676MHz. As you can see in the quick benchmarks below, this led to a performance increase of about 15%. "
So, that's the 27mhz MAX the review here claims...LOL
Yep, a 15% performance increase, or a lousy 27mhz, you decide.... amd fanboy fruiter, or real world overclocker...
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canu...
Alucard291 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Well as Ryan said in the article its "removed from the price curve" which in human language means: Its priced badly and is hoping to gain sales from publicity as opposed to quality.Oxford Guy - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Hence the "luxury product" meme.trajan2448 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Learn about latencies and micro stuttering, driver issues, heat and noise. Almost 50% better in frame latencies than 7970. Crossfire,don't make me laugh. here's an analysis.http://www.pcper.com/reviews/G...
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
correcting that link for you again, that shows the PATHETIC amd crap videocard loser for what it ishttp://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA...