The NVIDIA Titan V Preview - Titanomachy: War of the Titans
by Ryan Smith & Nate Oh on December 20, 2017 11:30 AM ESTPower, Temperature, & Noise
Finally, let's talk about power, temperature, and noise. At a high level, the Titan V should not be substantially different from other high-end NVIDIA cards. It has the same 250W TDP, and the cooler is nearly identical to NVIDIA’s other vapor chamber cooler designs. In short, NVIDIA has carved out a specific niche on power consumption that the Titan V should fall nicely into.
Unfortunately, no utilities seem to be reporting voltage or HBM temperature of Titan V at this time. These would be particularly of interest considering that Volta is fabbed on TSMC's bespoke 12FFN as opposed to 16nm FinFET. This also marks the first time NVIDIA has implemented HBM2 in gaming use-cases, where HBM temperatures or voltages could be elucidating.
| NVIDIA Titan V and Xp Average Clockspeeds | |||
| NVIDIA Titan V | NVIDIA Titan Xp | Percent Difference | |
| Idle | 135MHz | 139MHz | - |
| Boost Clocks |
1455MHz
|
1582MHz
|
-8.0% |
| Max Observed Boost |
1785MHz
|
1911MHz
|
-6.6% |
| LuxMark Max Boost | 1355MHz | 1911MHz | -29.0% |
| Battlefield 1 |
1651MHz
|
1767MHz
|
-6.6% |
| Ashes: Escalation |
1563MHz
|
1724MHz
|
-9.3% |
| DOOM |
1561MHz
|
1751MHz
|
-10.9% |
| Ghost Recon |
1699MHz
|
1808MHz
|
-6.0% |
| Deus Ex (DX11) |
1576MHz
|
1785MHz
|
-11.7% |
| GTA V |
1674MHz
|
1805MHz
|
-7.3% |
| Total War (DX11) | 1621MHz | 1759MHz | -7.8% |
| FurMark |
1200MHz
|
1404MHz
|
-14.5% |
Interestingly, LuxMark only brings Titan V to 1355MHz instead of its maximum boost clock, a behavior that differs from every other card we've benched in recent memory. Other compute and gaming tasks do bring the clocks higher, with a reported peak of 1785MHz.
The other takeaway is that Titan V is consistently outclocked by Titan Xp. In terms of gaming, Volta's performance gains do not seem to be coming from clockspeed improvements, unlike the bulk of Pascal's performance improvement over Maxwell.
Meanwhile it's worth noting that the HBM2 memory on the Titan V has only one observed clock state: 850MHz. This never deviates, even during FurMark as well as extended compute or gameplay. For the other consumer/prosumer graphics cards with HBM2, AMD's Vega cards downclock HBM2 in high temperature situations like FurMark, and also features a low-power 167MHz idle state.
Measuring power from the wall, Titan V's high idle and lower load readings jump out.
Meanwhile under load, the Titan V's power consumption at the wall is slightly but consistently lower than the Titan Xp's. Again despite the fact that both cards have the same TDPs, and NVIDIA's figures tend to be pretty consistent here since Maxwell implemented better power management.
During the course of benchmarking, GPU-Z reported a significant amount of Titan V thermal throttling, and that continued in Battlefield 1, where it oscillated between being capped out by GPU underutilization and temperature. And in FurMark, the Titan V was consistently temperature-limited.
Without HBM2 voltages, it is hard to say if the constant 850MHz clocks are related to Titan V's higher idle system draw. 815mm2 is quite large, but then again elements like Volta's tensor cores are not being utilized in gaming. In Battlefield 1, system power draw is actually lower than Titan Xp but GPU Z would suggest that thermal limits are the cause. Typically what we've seen with other NVIDIA 250W TDP cards is that they hit their TDP limits more often than they hit their temperature limits. So this is an unusual development.
Featuring an improved cooler, Titan V essentially manages the same noise metrics as its Titan siblings.
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maroon1 - Wednesday, December 20, 2017 - link
Correct if I'm wrong, Crysis warhead running 4K with 4xSSAA means it is running 8K (4 times as much as 4K) and then downscale to 4KRyan Smith - Wednesday, December 20, 2017 - link
Yes and no. Under the hood it's actually using a rotated grid, so it's a little more complex than just rendering it at a higher resolution.The resource requirements are very close to 8K rendering, but it avoids some of the quality drawbacks of scaling down an actual 8K image.
Frenetic Pony - Wednesday, December 20, 2017 - link
A hell of a lot of "It works great but only if you buy and program exclusively for Nvidia!" stuff here. Reminds me of Sony's penchant for exclusive lock in stuff over a decade ago when they were dominant. Didn't work out for Sony then, and this is worse for customers as they'll need to spend money on both dev and hardware.I'm sure some will be shortsighted enough to do so. But with Google straight up outbuying Nvidia for AI researchers (reportedly up to, or over, 10 million for just a 3 year contract) it's not a long term bet I'd make.
tuxRoller - Thursday, December 21, 2017 - link
I assumed you've not heard of CUDA before?NVIDIA had long been the only game in town when it comes to gpgpu HPC.
They're really a monopoly at this point, and researchers have no interest in making they're jobs harder by moving to a new ecosystem.
mode_13h - Wednesday, December 27, 2017 - link
OpenCL is out there, and AMD has had some products that were more than competitive with Nvidia, in the past. I think Nvidia won HPC dominance by bribing lots of researchers with free/cheap hardware and funding CUDA support in popular software packages. It's only with Pascal that their hardware really surpassed AMD's.tuxRoller - Sunday, December 31, 2017 - link
Ocl exists but cuda has MUCH higher mindshare. It's the de facto hpc framework used and taught in schools.mode_13h - Sunday, December 31, 2017 - link
True that Cuda seems to dominate HPC. I think Nvidia did a good job of cultivating the market for it.The trick for them now is that most deep learning users use frameworks which aren't tied to any Nvidia-specific APIs. I know they're pushing TensorRT, but it's certainly not dominant in the way Cuda dominates HPC.
tuxRoller - Monday, January 1, 2018 - link
The problem is that even the gpu accelerated nn frameworks are still largely built first using cuda. torch, caffe and tensorflow offer varying levels of ocl support (generally between some and none).Why is this still a problem? Well, where are the ocl 2.1+ drivers? Even 2.0 is super patchy (mainly due to nvidia not officially supporting anything beyond 1.2). Add to this their most recent announcements about merging ocp into vulkan and you have yourself an explanation for why cuda continues to dominate.
My hope is that khronos announce vulkan 2.0, with ocl being subsumed, very soon. Doing that means vendors only have to maintain a single driver (with everything consuming spirv) and nvidia would, basically, be forced to offer opencl-next. Bottom-line: if they can bring the ocl functionality into vulkan without massively increasing the driver complexity, I'd expect far more interest from the community.
mode_13h - Friday, January 5, 2018 - link
Your mistake is focusing on OpenCL support as a proxy for AMD support. Their solution was actually developing OpenMI as a substitute for Nvidia's cuDNN. They have forks of all the popular frameworks to support it - hopefully they'll get merged in, once ROCm support exists in the mainline Linux kernel.Of course, until AMD can answer the V100 on at least power-effeciency grounds, they're going to remain an also-ran, in the market for training. I think they're a bit more competitive for inferencing workloads, however.
CiccioB - Thursday, December 21, 2017 - link
What are you suggesting?GPU are a very customized piece of silicon and you have to code for them with optimization for each single architecture if you want to exploit them at the maximum.
If you think that people buy $10.000 cards to be put in $100.000 racks for a multiple $1.000.000 server just to use open source not optimized not supported not guarantee code in order to make AMD fanboys happy, well, not, it's not like the industry works.
Grow up.