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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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