The NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X Review
by Ryan Smith on March 17, 2015 3:00 PM ESTMiddle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
Our next benchmark is Monolith’s popular open-world action game, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. One of our current-gen console multiplatform titles, Shadow of Mordor is plenty punishing on its own, and at Ultra settings it absolutely devours VRAM, showcasing the knock-on effect of current-gen consoles have on VRAM requirements.
Once again even GTX Titan X won’t be enough for 60fps at 4K, but at 48.9fps it’s closer to 60fps than 30fps, representing a significant improvement in 4K performance in only a generation. Compared to the GTX 980 and NVIDIA’s other cards the GTX Titan X is once more in a comfortable lead, overtaking its smaller sibling by around 33% and the older GK110 cards at 45-60%.
Turning down the game’s quality settings to Very High does improve performance a bit, but at 54.1fps it’s still not quite enough for 60fps. The biggest advantage of Very High quality is alleviating some of the high VRAM requirements, something the GTX Titan cards don’t suffer from in the first place. Otherwise dropping to 1440p will give us a significant bump in performance, pushing framerates over 80fps once again.
Meanwhile the game’s minimum framerate further elaborates on the performance hit from the game’s high VRAM usage at Ultra quality. 3GB cards collapse here, leaving the 4GB cards and the 6GB original Titan much higher in our charts. Multi-GPU performance also struggles here, even with 4GB cards, reminding us that while multi-GPU setups can be potent, they do introduce performance consistency issues that single-GPU cards can avoid.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
276 Comments
View All Comments
dragonsqrrl - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
Had no idea that non reference Hawaii cards were generally undervolted resulting in lower power consumption. Source?chizow - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
There is some science behind it, heat results in higher leakage resulting in higher power consumption. But yes I agree, the reviews show otherwise, in fact, they show the cards that dont' throttle and boost unabated draw even more power, closer to 300W. So yes, that increased perf comes at the expense of higher power consumption, not sure why the AMD faithful believe otherwise.FlushedBubblyJock - Saturday, March 21, 2015 - link
Duh. It's because they hate Physx.Kutark - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
Yes, some of the new designs from aftermarket are cooler and quiter, but they dont use less power, the GPU is generating the power, the aftermarket companies can't alter that. They can only tame the beast, so to speak.Yojimbo - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
Would be a good point if the performance were the same. But the Titan X is 50% faster. The scores are also total system power usage under gaming load, not card usage. Running at 50% faster frame rates is going to tax other parts of the system more, as well.Kutark - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
You're kidding right. Your framerate in no way affects your power usage.nevcairiel - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
Actually, it might. If the GPU is faster, it might need more CPU power, which in turn can increase power draw from the CPU.DarkXale - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
Of course. Its the entire point of DX12/Mantle/Vulcan/Metal to reduce per-frame CPU work, and as a consequence per-frame CPU power consumption.Yojimbo - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
The main point of my post is that Titan X gets 50% more performance/system watt. But yes, your frame rate should affect your power usage if you are GPU-bound. The CPU, for instance, will be working harder maintaining the higher frame rates. How much harder, I have no idea, but it's a variable that needs to be considered before testbug00's antecedent can be considered true.dragonsqrrl - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
Actually frame rates have a lot to do with power usage.I don't think that needs any further explanation, anyone who's even moderately informed knows this, and even if they didn't could probably figure out why this might be the case in about 10 seconds.