The NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X Review
by Ryan Smith on March 17, 2015 3:00 PM ESTTotal War: Attila
The second strategy game in our benchmark suite, Total War: Attila is the latest game in the Total War franchise. Total War games have traditionally been a mix of CPU and GPU bottlenecks, so it takes a good system on both ends of the equation to do well here. In this case the game comes with a built-in benchmark that plays out over a large area with a fortress in the middle, making it a good GPU stress test.
In creating Attila, the developers at Creative Assembly sought to push the limit of current generation video cards, and this is no more evident than at 4K Max Quality. At 23.5fps even the GTX Titan X is foiled here, never mind the GTX 980 and GK110 cards. To get single card performance above 30fps we have to drop a notch to the “Quality” setting, which gets the GTX Titan X up to 44.9fps. In any case, at these settings the GTX Titan X makes easy work of the single-GPU competition, beating everything else by 30-66%.
Alternatively we can drop from 4K to 1440p and still run Max Quality, in which case the GTX Titan X delivers a very similar 47.1fps.
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Antronman - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
The Titan has always been marketed as a hybrid between a gaming and graphics development card.H3ld3r - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
Agree 100%H3ld3r - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
http://tpucdn.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_Titan...Evarin - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
For people thinking that VRAM is unneeded, you must not be heavy into modding. Especially with Fallout 4 and GTA 5 on the horizon, massive amounts of room for texture mods will come in handy.Black Obsidian - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
6-8GB would seem to meet that requirement nicely.As is often the case with "doubled RAM" models, by the time that 12GB of VRAM is useful, we'll be a couple of generations down the road, and cards with 12GB of VRAM will be much faster, much cheaper, or both.
Maybe at that point a Titan X owner could pick up a cheap used card and run them in SLI, but even then they're laying out more money than a user who buys a $500 card every couple of years and has the VRAM he/she needs when it's actually useful.
H3ld3r - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
I agree with you but don't forget how vram is used in sli and cf. Vram of gpu 1 mirrors vram of 0 so if have 2x 4gb you're only taking advantage of 4gb. Anyway i prefer fast ram than hughe amounts of it.Evarin - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
We've already had a game which called for 6GB VRAM for an advanced texture pack. Imagine an Elder Scrolls or a Fallout where every single object in the game has a 4k resolution texture. I think it'd be a challenge even for the titan.Antronman - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
The way that RAM works is the worse your system is, the more RAM you end up needing.There are plateaus, but as GPUs get faster you need less VRAM to store the same amount of information.
The Titan X is much faster than the Titan BE, and thus needs less VRAM, assuming that the application is the same.
Then we get into Direct X 12 and Vulkan. They're supposed to increase efficiency all-around, reducing the demand for resources like RAM and cores even more.
Death666Angel - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
"the card is generally overpowered for the relatively low maximum resolutions of DL-DVI "So I can drive my 1440p 105Hz display with it and get above 105fps? No? So what kind of statement is that then. DL-DVI may be old, but to say that 1440p is a low maximum resolution, especially with 100Hz+ IPS displays which rely on DL-DVI input, is strange to say the least.
H3ld3r - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
Based in what i saw in ryan's review 4k games aren't that much memory demanding. If so how can anyone explain R9 performance?