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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
276 Comments
View All Comments
Kevin G - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
Last I checked, rectal limits are a bit north of 700 mm^2. However, nVidia is already in the crazy realm in terms of economics when it comes to supply/demand/yields/cost. Getting fully functional chips with die sizes over 600 mm^2 isn't easy. Then again, it isn't easy putting down $999 USD for a graphics card.However, harvested parts should be quiet plentiful and the retail price of such a card should be appropriately lower.
Michael Bay - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
>rectal limits are a bit north of 700 mm^2Oh wow.
Kevin G - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
@Michael BayIntel's limit is supposed to be between 750 and 800 mm^2. They have released a 699 mm^2 product commercially (Tukwilla Itanium 2) a few years ago so it can be done.
Michael Bay - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
>rectal limitsD. Lister - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
lolchizow - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
Yes its clear Nvidia had to make sacrifices somewhere to maintain advancements on 28nm and it looks like FP64/DP got the cut. I'm fine with it though, at least on GeForce products I don't want to pay a penny more for non-gaming products, if someone wants dedicated compute, go Tesla/Quadro.Yojimbo - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
Kepler also has dedicated FP64 cores and from what I see in Anandtech articles, those cores are not used for FP32 calculations. How does NVIDIA save power with Maxwell by leaving FP64 cores off the die? The Maxwell GPUs seem to still be FP64 capable with respect to the number of FP64 cores placed on the die. It seems what they save by having less FP64 cores is die space and, as a result, the ability to have more FP32 cores. In other words, I haven't seen any information about Maxwell that leads me to believe they couldn't have added more FP64 cores when designing GM200 to make a GPU with superior double precision performance and inferior single precision performance compared with the configuration they actually chose for GM200. Maybe they just judged single precision performance to be more important to focus on than double precision, with a performance boost for double precision users having to wait until Pascal is released. Perhaps it was a choice between making a modest performance boost for both single and double precision calculations or making a significant performance boost for single precision calculations by forgoing double precision. Maybe they thought the efficiency gain of Maxwell could not carry sales on its own.testbug00 - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
If this is a 250W card using about the same power as the 290x under gaming load, what does that make the 290x?Creig - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
A very good value for the money.shing3232 - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
Agree.