The NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X Review
by Ryan Smith on March 17, 2015 3:00 PM ESTMiddle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
Our next benchmark is Monolith’s popular open-world action game, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. One of our current-gen console multiplatform titles, Shadow of Mordor is plenty punishing on its own, and at Ultra settings it absolutely devours VRAM, showcasing the knock-on effect of current-gen consoles have on VRAM requirements.
Once again even GTX Titan X won’t be enough for 60fps at 4K, but at 48.9fps it’s closer to 60fps than 30fps, representing a significant improvement in 4K performance in only a generation. Compared to the GTX 980 and NVIDIA’s other cards the GTX Titan X is once more in a comfortable lead, overtaking its smaller sibling by around 33% and the older GK110 cards at 45-60%.
Turning down the game’s quality settings to Very High does improve performance a bit, but at 54.1fps it’s still not quite enough for 60fps. The biggest advantage of Very High quality is alleviating some of the high VRAM requirements, something the GTX Titan cards don’t suffer from in the first place. Otherwise dropping to 1440p will give us a significant bump in performance, pushing framerates over 80fps once again.
Meanwhile the game’s minimum framerate further elaborates on the performance hit from the game’s high VRAM usage at Ultra quality. 3GB cards collapse here, leaving the 4GB cards and the 6GB original Titan much higher in our charts. Multi-GPU performance also struggles here, even with 4GB cards, reminding us that while multi-GPU setups can be potent, they do introduce performance consistency issues that single-GPU cards can avoid.
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cmoney408 - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
can you please post the settings you used for the 295x2? not the in game settings, but what you used in catalyst.FlushedBubblyJock - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
" and the Radeon R9 295X2, the latter of which is down to ~$699 these days and "I knew it wouldn't be $699 when i clicked the link...
its frikkin $838 , $ 1,176 $990, $978 ...
Yep, that's the real amd card price, not the fantasy one.
gianluca - Sunday, April 5, 2015 - link
Hi!Just a question: Do you suggest me to buy r9 295x2?
Thx
Kyururin - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
Umm I find it pointless to compare AMD R9 290x with GTX 980, R9 290x is build to be competitive to Nvidia's stock 780 not 780ti and sure as hell not GTX 980, it's dumb, it's like trying to ask a grandma(R9 290x) to compete with supermodel(GTX 980) in a beauty pageant, of course Nvidia is going to win, but it's not like the winning gap is spectacular or something to be astonished about. Last but not least GTX 980's lead over the grandma is the largest sub 2k, let's not forget that both the GTX 980 and the grandma are build to handle 4k so given the time Nvidia has to prepare the GTX980, it should had obliterated the grandma in 4k but the performance gap is not that fricking big and deserved to be woved, especially FarCry 4. Fanboys always bash AMD for their terrible drivers but it's not like they are ignored you dumb witt, they are slowly improving their drivers. Did AMD ever said We are going to pretend that our driver don't suck and so we are not going to fix it.alexreffand - Monday, May 18, 2015 - link
Why is the GTX 580 in the tests? Why not the Titan Z or even the 970?ajboysen - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link
I'm not sure if the specs have changed since this post but they list the boost clock speed as 1531 MHz, Not 1002