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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Sufo - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
lol, you clearly haven't run a dual gpu setup.Veteranv2 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Such a shame. How you can you disregard all the dual GPU cards?Another biased review. I miss the time when Anand used to be objective. Now it is just a Intel/Nvidia propaganda site. Not even an objective final thoughts. It is really a shame. I feel sad.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Um? They're there. Along with 680 SLI and 7970GE CrossFire.processinfo - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Act surprised? He means that in final thoughts you downplaying fact that Titan is slower than dual GPU cards. I agree with him. It seems biased, especially when later you talk about 3 way SLI with Titan that would have same issues like dual GPU cards. They cost the same or less and they are faster. For gaming this card brings nothing to the table. For $500-600 it would be different story.Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Ahh.So our editorial stance is that while SLI/CF are great, they should only be used to increase performance beyond what a single large GPU can accomplish. AFR comes with some very notable penalties, and while these are acceptable when you can go no bigger, we do not believe these are good tradeoffs to make otherwise.
It's the same reason why we didn't recommend cards like the GTX 560 Ti 2Win over the GTX 580.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5048/evgas-geforce-g...
Simply put we'd rather have the more consistent performance and freedom from profiles that having a single GTX Titan provides, over the higher but also more unreliable performance of a GTX 690.
Alucard291 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Well its exactly as you said Ryan. Its overpriced and badly positioned in the market (except you used much kinder words - presumably to keep your paycheck)Its a nice, pointless consumer (that's a key word right here) gpu which brings benefits (what are those benefits exactly?) of overpriced compute performance to people who don't need compute performance.
Beautiful move Nvidia.
processinfo - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
It is not about recommendation. I prefer single GPU and no SLI configs myself.It is about a fact that it is just slower than anything with similar price tag.
This is card only for people who need both: fast gaming card and computing card in one (or for those who don't care about a price).
Hrel - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
I think it's about time you re-asses that stance. SLI/CF has come a long way in the past few years.Also, 1000 dollars for one card puts it so far out of consideration it doesn't even count as an option for single GPU use. Which was why he said "For $500-600 it would be a different story". For gaming this card is useless. For Compute it seems 7970GHE would be a better option too. Again, based solely on price. Performance is close enough it makes WAY more sense to just buy 2 of those for 860 bucks if you really need to do some serious GPU compute.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Actually we did re-assess our stance ahead of this article.Far Cry 3 came out and SLI didn't work correctly; it took a few NVIDIA releases to get it up to where it is today. That's exactly the kind of scenario that drives our existing stance.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Yes, of course, forget mentioning the half decade of AMD epic failure in CF...It's just amazing what I read here. The bias is so glaring a monkey couldn't miss it.