NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTCivilization V
Our final game, Civilization V, gives us an interesting look at things that other RTSes cannot match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry, driver command lists for reducing CPU overhead, and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.
Maxing out at 2560, even with everything turned up none of our high-end cards have a problem here. Somewhat surprisingly we’re not completely CPU limited here, but even at 2560 everything north of the GTX 580 gets 60fps.
Nevertheless Titan completely clobbers the competition on our final game, delivering 60% better performance than both the GTX 680 and 7970GE. Even the 7990 can at best tie Titan here, giving us a case for when one GK110 is as good as two Tahiti GPUs. It’s not clear what exactly Civ V favors about Titan, but it’s clearly something that makes Titan different from GTX 680 and other GK104 cards.
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UzairH - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Ah ok, thanks for the explanation Ryan. Fair enough if the game is CPU bound, and your policy sounds fair as well. Please note however that at high resolutions enabling SSAO kills the performance, and enabling Transparency Anti-aliasing on top of that even more so, so even without mods Skyrim can still be pretty brutal on cards like the 670 and HD 7970.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
LOL ignore the idiocy and buy the great nVidia card, you'll NEVER have to hear another years long screed from amd fanboys about 3G of ram being future-proof -ESPECIALLY WITH SKYRIM AND ADDONS!!!!As they screamed endlessly....
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
It's a bunch of HOOEY no matter how reasonable "the policy" excuse sounds...http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2013/02/21/nvidia...
There's the Skyrim results, with TITAN 40+% ahead.
trajan2448 - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link
AMDs fps numbers are overstated. They figured out a trick to make runt frames, or frames which are not actually rendered to trigger the fps monitor as a real fully rendered frame. This is real problem for AMD much worse than the latency problem. Crossfire is a disaster which is why numerous reviewers including Tech Report have written that Crossfire produces higher fps but feels less smooth than Nvidia.Check this article out. http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA...
Ankarah - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
From a regular consumer's point of view, the hype it being the fastest 'single' graphics card doesn't really appeal that much - it doesn't make a difference to me how these video cards work in what configurations underneath its big case, as long as it does its job.So I really can't understand why any regular consumer would intentionally choose this over the 690GTX, which seems to be faster overall for the same price, unless you belong to perhaps 0.5% of their market share where you absolutely require FP64 executions for your work but don't really need the full power of Tesla.
And let's face it, if you are willing to shell out a grand for your graphics card for your PC, you aren't worried about the difference their TDP will make on your electric bills.
So I think it's just a marketing circus specifically engineered to draw in a lucky few, to whom money or price/performance ratio holds no value at all - there's nothing to see here for regular Joes like you and me.
Let's move along.
sherlockwing - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
This card is for people willing to spend at least $2K on their Graphic cards and don't want to deal with Quad GPU scaling while also having room for a Third. If you don't have that much cash you are not in its target audience.Ankarah - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
That makes sense,so this card, however we slice it, is only for about perhaps 1% of the consumer base if even that.
andrewaggb - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
pretty much. And bragging rights.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
not for the crybabies we have here.Yet go to another thread and the screaming about the 7990 and the endless dual top end videocard setups with thousand dollar INTEL cpu's will be endless.
It all depends on whose diapers the pooing crybabies are soiling at the moment.
cmdrdredd - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Plus people who want to break world records in benchmarking.