The NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X Review
by Ryan Smith on March 17, 2015 3:00 PM ESTOur 2015 GPU Benchmark Suite
Also kicking off alongside GTX Titan X today will be the first article to use our new 2015 GPU benchmark suite.
For 2015 we have upgraded or replaced most of our games, retiring several long-time titles including Bioshock: Infinite, Metro, and our last DirectX 10 game, Crysis Warhead. Our returning titles are Battlefield 4 and Crysis 3, the former of which is still a popular MP title to this day, and the latter continuing to pulverize GPUs well before we hit its highest settings.
Joining these 2 games are 7 new titles. Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Far Cry 4 are our new action/shooter games, while Dragon Age: Inquisition rides the line between an action game and an RPG. Meanwhile for strategy games we have Civilization: Beyond Earth and Total War: Attila, these two games representing the latest entries in their respective series. Rounding out our collection is GRID Autosport, the latest GRID game from Codemasters, and the unique first person puzzle/exploration game The Talos Principle from Croteam.
| AnandTech GPU Bench 2015 Game List | ||||
| Game | Genre | API(s) | ||
| Battlefield 4 | FPS | DX11 + Mantle | ||
| Crysis 3 | FPS | DX11 | ||
| Shadow of Mordor | Action/Open World | DX11 | ||
| Civilization: Beyond Earth | Strategy | DX11 + Mantle | ||
| Dragon Age: Inquisition | RPG | DX11 + Mantle | ||
| The Talos Principle | First Person Puzzle | DX11 | ||
| Far Cry 4 | FPS | DX11 | ||
| Total War: Attila | Strategy | DX11 | ||
| GRID Autosport | Racing | DX11 | ||
With new low-level APIs ramping up in 2015, we’re going to be paying particular attention to APIs starting this year, as everyone is interested in seeing what Vulkan (née Mantle) and DirectX 12 can do. Unless otherwise noted, going forward all benchmarks will be using low-level APIs when available, meaning DX12/Vulkan/Mantle when possible.
Meanwhile from a design standpoint our benchmark settings remain unchanged. For lower-end cards we’ll look at 1080p at various quality settings when practical, and for high-end cards we’ll be looking at 1080p and above at the highest quality settings. The one exception to this is 4K, which at 2.25x the resolution of 1440p remains difficult to hit playable framerates, in which case we’ll also include a lower quality setting to showcase what kind of quality hit it takes to make 4K playable on current video cards.
The Test
As for our hardware testbed, it remains unchanged from 2014, being composed of an overclocked Core i7-4960X hosed in an NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition case.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: | AMD Radeon R9 295X2 AMD Radeon R9 290X AMD Radeon HD 7990 NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 347.84 Beta AMD Catalyst Cat 15.3 Beta |
| OS: | Windows 8.1 Pro |
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modeless - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
This *is* a compute card, but for an application that doesn't need FP64: deep learning. In fact, deep learning would do even better with FP16. What deep learning does need is lots of ALUs (check) and lots of RAM (double check). Deep learning people were asking for more RAM and they got it. I'm considering buying one just for training neural nets.Yojimbo - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
Yes, I got that idea from the keynote address, and I think that's why they have 12GB of RAM. But how much deep-learning-specific compute demand is there? Are there lots of people who use compute just for deep learning and nothing else that demands FP64 performance? Enough that it warrants building an entire GPU (M200) just for them? Surely NVIDIA is counting mostly on gaming sales for Titan and whatever cut-down M200 card arrives later.Yojimbo - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
Oh, and of course also counting on the Quadro sales in the workstation market.DAOWAce - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
Nearly double the performance of a single 780 when heavily OC'd, jesus christ, I wish I had disposable income.I already got burned by buying a 780 though ($722 before it dropped $200 a month later due to the Ti's release), so I'd much rather at this point extend the lifespan of my system by picking up some cheap second hand 780 and dealing with SLI's issues again (haven't used it since my 2x 460's) while I sit and wait for the 980 Ti to get people angry again or even until the next die shrink.
At any rate, I won't get burned again buying my first ever enthusiast card, that's for damn sure.
Will Robinson - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
Well Titan X looks like a really mean machine.A bit pricey but Top Dog has always been like that for NV so you can't ping it too badly on that.I'm really glad NVDA has set their "Big Maxwell" benchmark because now it's up to R390X to defeat it.
This will be flagship V flagship with the winner taking all the honors.
poohbear - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
Couldn't u show us a chart of VRAM usage for Shadows of Mordor instead of minimum frames? Argus Monitor charts VRAM usage, it would've been great to see how much average and maximum VRAM Shadows of Mordor uses (of the available 12gb).Meaker10 - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
They only show paged ram, not actual usage.ChristopherJack - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
I'm surprised how often the ageing 7990 tops this. I had no doubt what so ever that the 295x2 was going to stomp all over this & that's what bothered me about everyone claiming the Titan X was going to be the fastest graphics card, blah, blah, blah. Yes I'm aware those are dual GPU cards in xfire, no I don't care because they're single cards & can be found for significantly lower prices if price/performance is the only concern.Pc_genjin - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
So... as a person who has the absolute worst timing ever when it comes to purchasing technology, I built a brand new PC - FOR THE FIRST TIME IN NINE YEARS - just three days ago with 2 x GTX 980s. I haven't even received them yet, and I run across several reviews for this - today. Now, the question is: do I attempt to return the two 980s, saving $100 in the process? Or is it just better to keep the 980s? (Thankfully I didn't build the system yet, and consequently open them already, or I'd be livid.). Thanks for any advice, and sorry for any arguments I spark, yikes.)D. Lister - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
The 2x980s would be significantly more powerful than a single Titan X, even with 1/3rd the total VRAM.