The NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X Review
by Ryan Smith on March 17, 2015 3:00 PM ESTBattlefield 4
Kicking off our 2015 benchmark suite is Battlefield 4, DICE’s 2013 multiplayer military shooter. After a rocky start, Battlefield 4 has since become a challenging game in its own right and a showcase title for low-level graphics APIs. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, based on our experiences our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, which means a card needs to be able to average at least 60fps if it’s to be able to hold up in multiplayer.
After stripping away the Frostbite engine’s expensive (and not wholly effective) MSAA, what we’re left with for BF4 at 4K with Ultra quality puts the GTX Titan X in a pretty good light. At 58.3fps it’s not quite up to the 60fps mark, but it comes very close, close enough that the GTX Titan X should be able to stay above 30fps virtually the entire time, and never drop too far below 30fps in even the worst case scenario. Alternatively, dropping to Medium quality should give the GTX Titan X plenty of headroom, with an average framerate of 94.8fps meaning even the lowest framerate never drops below 45fps.
From a benchmarking perspective Battlefield 4 at this point is a well optimized title that’s a pretty good microcosm of overall GPU performance. In this case we find that the GTX Titan X performs around 33% better than the GTX 980, which is almost exactly in-line with our earlier performance predictions. Keeping in mind that while GTX Titan X has 50% more execution units than GTX 980, it’s also clocked at around 88% of the clockspeed, so 33% is right where we should be in a GPU-bound scenario.
Otherwise compared to the GTX 780 Ti and the original GTX Titan, the performance advantage at 4K is around 50% and 66% respectively. GTX Titan X is not going to double the original Titan’s performance – there’s only so much you can do without a die shrink – but it continues to be amazing just how much extra performance NVIDIA has been able to wring out without increasing power consumption and with only a minimal increase in die size.
On the broader competitive landscape, this is far from the Radeon R9 290X/290XU’s best title, with GTX Titan X leading by 50-60%. However this is also a showcase title for when AFR goes right, as the R9 295X2 and GTX 980 SLI both shoot well past the GTX Titan X, demonstrating the performance/consistency tradeoff inherent in multi-GPU setups.
Finally, shifting gears for a moment, gamers looking for the ultimate 1440p card will not be disappointed. GTX Titan X will not get to 120fps here (it won’t even come close), but at 78.7fps it’s well suited for driving 1440p144 displays. In fact it’s the only single-GPU card to do better than 60fps at this resolution.
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FlushedBubblyJock - Saturday, March 21, 2015 - link
Wow, it's stomping all over 2 of AMDs best gpu's combined.It's a freaking monster.
cykodrone - Saturday, March 21, 2015 - link
I actually went to the trouble to make an account to say sometimes I come here just to read the comments, some of the convos have me rolling on the floor busting my guts laughing, seriously, this is free entertainment at its best! Aside from that, the cost of this Nvidia e-penis would feed 10 starving children for a month. I mean seriously, at what point is it overkill? By that I mean is there any game out there that would absolutely not run good enough on a slightly lesser card at half the price? When I read this card alone requires 250W, my eyes popped out of my head, holy electric bill batman, but I guess if somebody has a 1G to throw away on an e-penis, they don't have electric bill worries. One more question, what kind of CPU/motherboard would you need to back this sucker up? I think this card would be retarded without at least the latest i7 Extreme(ly overpriced), can you imagine some tool dropping this in an i3? What I'm saying is, this sucker would need an expensive 'bed' too, otherwise, you'd just be wasting your time and money.sna1970 - Saturday, March 21, 2015 - link
What dual GTX 980 Anand ?for 2 x $300 Gtx 970 you will get the same or better performance than Titan X for $600 ONLY.
almost same power as well.
$1000 for this card is too much , Just tooooo much.
rolfaalto - Saturday, March 21, 2015 - link
So much silly complaining about value. This is an incredible bargain for compute compared to Tesla -- absolutely crushes at single precision for a fraction of the price! For my application the new Titan X is the absolute best that money can buy, and it's comparatively cheap. So, I'll buy 10 of them, and 100 more if they work out.rolfaalto - Saturday, March 21, 2015 - link
... and the 12GB is the deal maker, 6 GB on the previous Titans was way too little.yiling cao - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
for people using cuda, there is just no AMD option, Upgrading every nvidia new releases.Antronman - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
Or, if you're the kind of person who actually needs CUDA and isn't just using it because they made a mistake in choosing their software and just chose something with a bloated price tag and fancy webpage then you get a Quadro card instead of wasting your money on a Titan.You know. The sort of people who need Solidworks because they're working for a multimillion or even multibillion dollar corporation that wants 3D models or is using GPU computing, or if you're using Maya to animate a movie for a multimillion dollar studio.
Even if you're an indie on a budget, you don't buy a Titan. Because you won't be using software with CUDA or special Nvidia optimization. Because you won't be using iRay.
With the exception of industry applications (excluding individual/small businesses), Nvidia is currently just a choice for brand loyalists or people who want a big epeen.
r13j13r13 - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
titan x vs R9 295x2MyNuts - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
Ill take 2 pleaseXsjado Koncept - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
Your "in-house project developed by our very own Dr. Ian Cutress" is garbage and is obviously not dividing workloads between multi-GPUs, a very simple task for any programmer with access to Google.It's plain as day to see, but gives NV the lead in another benchmark - was this the goal of such awful programming?