The NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X Review
by Ryan Smith on March 17, 2015 3:00 PM ESTOur 2015 GPU Benchmark Suite
Also kicking off alongside GTX Titan X today will be the first article to use our new 2015 GPU benchmark suite.
For 2015 we have upgraded or replaced most of our games, retiring several long-time titles including Bioshock: Infinite, Metro, and our last DirectX 10 game, Crysis Warhead. Our returning titles are Battlefield 4 and Crysis 3, the former of which is still a popular MP title to this day, and the latter continuing to pulverize GPUs well before we hit its highest settings.
Joining these 2 games are 7 new titles. Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Far Cry 4 are our new action/shooter games, while Dragon Age: Inquisition rides the line between an action game and an RPG. Meanwhile for strategy games we have Civilization: Beyond Earth and Total War: Attila, these two games representing the latest entries in their respective series. Rounding out our collection is GRID Autosport, the latest GRID game from Codemasters, and the unique first person puzzle/exploration game The Talos Principle from Croteam.
| AnandTech GPU Bench 2015 Game List | ||||
| Game | Genre | API(s) | ||
| Battlefield 4 | FPS | DX11 + Mantle | ||
| Crysis 3 | FPS | DX11 | ||
| Shadow of Mordor | Action/Open World | DX11 | ||
| Civilization: Beyond Earth | Strategy | DX11 + Mantle | ||
| Dragon Age: Inquisition | RPG | DX11 + Mantle | ||
| The Talos Principle | First Person Puzzle | DX11 | ||
| Far Cry 4 | FPS | DX11 | ||
| Total War: Attila | Strategy | DX11 | ||
| GRID Autosport | Racing | DX11 | ||
With new low-level APIs ramping up in 2015, we’re going to be paying particular attention to APIs starting this year, as everyone is interested in seeing what Vulkan (née Mantle) and DirectX 12 can do. Unless otherwise noted, going forward all benchmarks will be using low-level APIs when available, meaning DX12/Vulkan/Mantle when possible.
Meanwhile from a design standpoint our benchmark settings remain unchanged. For lower-end cards we’ll look at 1080p at various quality settings when practical, and for high-end cards we’ll be looking at 1080p and above at the highest quality settings. The one exception to this is 4K, which at 2.25x the resolution of 1440p remains difficult to hit playable framerates, in which case we’ll also include a lower quality setting to showcase what kind of quality hit it takes to make 4K playable on current video cards.
The Test
As for our hardware testbed, it remains unchanged from 2014, being composed of an overclocked Core i7-4960X hosed in an NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition case.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: | AMD Radeon R9 295X2 AMD Radeon R9 290X AMD Radeon HD 7990 NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 347.84 Beta AMD Catalyst Cat 15.3 Beta |
| OS: | Windows 8.1 Pro |
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Urizane - Monday, March 23, 2015 - link
660 and 660 Ti are different chips entirely, with 660 Ti not fully enabled.chizow - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
@stun you're in for a huge upgrade either way. Makes sense to wait though, but I am not sure if 390X will change current pricing if at all. But Nvidia may also launch a cut down GM200 in that timeframe to give you another option in that $500+ range.Da W - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
Usually, the last one out is the fastest.furthur - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
you're an absolute idiot if you jump on this crap. grab a 290 in the mean time and a 390x on release,Michael Bay - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
Maybe he doesn`t need an equivalent of a room heater in his case like you do, brah.Phartindust - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
At 83c, you're not exactly making ice cubes with titan.cactusdog - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
Im not convinced about this TitanX and the last titan turned out to be a bad investment for the $1,000 asking price. Last time, Titan came out (at $1,000) then a matter of weeks later , the 780TI came out with the same performance for $300 less. This time, we have the 390X soon but no doubt Nvidia have a 980TI up their sleeve, so the value of these highend $1,000 cards disappears quickly making it a bad investment. I expect a $1,000 card to hold the performance crown for at least 6-12 months not a few weeks, then get out performed by a card that costs $300 less.Laststop311 - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
it wasn't weeks later it was many months laterD. Lister - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
@cactusdog"Titan came out (at $1,000) then a matter of weeks later , the 780TI came out with the same performance for $300 less."
Actually the 780Ti, having a lot more CUDA cores, destroys the original Titan in gaming performance. The 780Ti equivalent was the "Titan Black", with the same amount of cores, but twice the VRAM, slightly higher default core clock, and fully unlocked compute.
Phartindust - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
^This