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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CeriseCogburn - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
LMHO - yes by the time the amd fanboy actually declares his amd fanboyism, amd won't be around anymore....Yes, you're done.
Alucard291 - Friday, March 8, 2013 - link
And naturally you're not a fanboy... Dear god... you cannot be that stupid...MrSpadge - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Don't buy it, period.CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Another amd fanboy control freak loser.I won't be taking your "advice".
Alucard291 - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Yup you really DO need to grow up a little. Or a lot. Your choice.CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Nope, you crybabies and poorboy whiners are the sad little tropes that need adulthood desperately.Adults earn money and have a grand to spend.
Crybaby children do not.
Alucard291 - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
Looking at the way you're expressing your impotent rage all over this review's comment section you sound roughly old enough to be my son's class mate :)DemBones79 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Wow... did no one read the first part of this article? I think it's pretty obvious from the price/performance ratio that NVIDIA is trying to scare away all but the most truly insane enthusiasts and the compute-on-a-budget crowd.My guess is that yields are still abysmally low and they're still reeling from the backlog of Tesla orders that resulted from the Titan supercomputer contract win. Given that, they probably do not have sufficient supply yet to meet "enthusiast" demand, so they priced it more into the "you've got to be insane to pay this much for this little" bracket.
Whereas computer scientists and others who could benefit from the compute tech on the card could probably more readily convince their Finance depts. to loosen the purse strings for this as opposed to a Tesla proper.
Don't be fooled. This may be labeled as a "consumer" card, and it certainly is a performance bump over the 680, but it was not brought into this world for the express purpose of playing games.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
You people are all lying freaks.A day before this, many of you screamed buy 2x of the top end, and when amd was charging $599 for one, you were all good with that.
Now like stupid crybaby two year olds, you've all copped the same whine.
You're all pathetic. All liars, too. All sheep that cannot be consistent at all.
Alucard291 - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Stop being so rude and abusive.Take a break. Stand up go outside, take some deep breaths. Stay away from the internet for a bit.
Might do you some good.