The NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X Review
by Ryan Smith on March 17, 2015 3:00 PM ESTCrysis 3
Still one of our most punishing benchmarks, Crysis 3 needs no introduction. With Crysis 3, Crytek has gone back to trying to kill computers and still holds “most punishing shooter” title in our benchmark suite. Only in a handful of setups can we even run Crysis 3 at its highest (Very High) settings, and that’s still without AA. Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to drive games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2015.
With GTX Titan X being based on the same iteration of the Maxwell architecture as the GTX 980 and its GM200 GPU essentially built as a GM204 + 50%, it comes as no surprise that the performance gains over GTX 980 are going to be rather consistent. In Crysis 3 the GTX Titan X holds a 35% performance lead at 4K, with that lead tapering slightly to 30% at 2560. Meanwhile the lead over the GK110 cards isn’t quite what we saw with BF4, dropping to around 45% and 55% for GTX 780 Ti and GTX Titan respectively.
As one of our most punishing games, this is also a good example of where even GTX Titan X will come up short at 4K. Even without MSAA and one step below Crysis 3’s Very High quality settings, the GTX Titan X can only muster 42fps. If you want to get to 60fps you will need to drop to Low quality, or drop the resolution to 1440p. The latter will get you 85.2fps at the same quality settings, which again highlights GTX Titan X’s second strength as a good card for driving high refresh rate 1440p displays.
Meanwhile this is another game where our multi-GPU cards still pull ahead, reminding us of the spoiler potential for the R9 295X2 and the GTX 980 SLI. In fact AMD gets some very good scaling here, and they need it as the GTX Titan X bests the R9 290XU by 56% at 4K High.
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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?