NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTFar Cry 3
The final new game added to the latest rendition of our benchmark suite is Far Cry 3, Ubisoft’s recently released island-jungle action game. A lot like our other jungle game Crysis, Far Cry 3 can be quite tough on GPUs, especially with MSAA and improved alpha-to-coverage checking thrown into the mix. On the other hand it’s still a bit of a pig on the CPU side, and seemingly inexplicably we’ve found that it doesn’t play well with HyperThreading on our testbed, making this the only game we’ve ever had to disable HT for to maximize our framerates.
For the 7970GE and GTX 680, FC3 at 2560 was already a very close match. Or put another way, with the 7970GE and GTX 680 tied up with each other, Titan is free to clear the both of them by approximately 35% each at 2560. This is enough to launch Titan past the 60fps mark, the first for any single-GPU card.
As for our other resolutions, it’s interesting to note that the gains at both 5760 and 1920 with MSAA are actually greater than at 2560. As we mentioned before Far Cry is somewhat demanding on the CPU side of things, so Titan may not be fully stretching out at 2560. In which case the performance gains due to Titan would be closer to 45-50%.
Moving on to our multi-GPU cards, this is something of a mixed bag. Titan isn’t close to winning, but GTX 690 wins by under 30%, and 7990 by just 17%. This is despite the fact that SLI/CF scaling is as strong as it is. At the same time Far Cry 3 is a good contemporary reminder of just what Titan can excel at: had Titan been out in 2012, it would have been doing roughly this well while NVIDIA would have still been hammering out their SLI profiles for this game. Multi-GPU cards are powerful, but they are forever reliant on waiting for profiles to unlock their capabilities.
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chizow - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
You must not have followed the development of GPUs, and particularly flagship GPUs very closely in the last decade or so.G80, the first "Compute GPGPU" as Nvidia put it, was first and foremost a graphics part and a kickass one at that. Each flagship GPU after, GT200, GT200b, GF100, GF110 have continued in this vein...driven by the desktop graphics market first, Tesla/compute market second. Hell, the Tesla business did not even exist until the GeForceTesla200. Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, even got on stage likening his GPUs to superheroes with day jobs as graphics cards while transforming into supercomputers at night.
Now Nvidia flips the script, holds back the flagship GPU from the gaming market that *MADE IT POSSIBLE* and wants to charge you $1K because it's got "SuperComputer Guts"??? That's bait and switch, stab in the back, whatever you want to call it. So yes, if you were actually in this market before, Nvidia has screwed you over to the tune of $1K for something that used to cost $500-$650 max.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
You only spend at max $360 for a video card as you stated, so this doesn't affect you and you haven't been screwed.Grow up crybaby. A company may chagre what it desires, and since you're never buying, who cares how many times you scream they screwed everyone ?
NO ONE CARES, not even you, since you never even pony up $500, as you yourself stated in this long, continuous crybaby whine you made here, and have been making, since the 680 was released, or rather, since Charlie fried your brain with his propaganda.
Go get your 98 cent a gallon gasoline while you're at it , you fool.
chizow - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Uh no, I've spent over $1K in a single GPU purchasing transaction, have you? I didn't think so.I'm just unwilling to spend *$2K* for what cost $1K in the past for less than the expected increase in performance. I spent $700 this round instead of the usual $1K because that's all I was willing to pay for a mid-range ASIC in GK104 and while it was still a significant upgrade to my last set of $1K worth of graphics cards, I wasn't going to plunk down $1K for a set of mid-range GK104 GTX 680s.
It's obvious you have never bought in this range of GPUs in the past, otherwise you wouldn't be posting such retarded replys for what is clearly usurious pricing by Nvidia.
Now go away, idiot.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - link
Wrong again, as usual.So what it boils down to is you're a cheapskate, still disgruntled, still believe in Charlie D's lie, and are angry you won't have the current top card at a price you demand.
I saw your whole griping list in the other thread too, but none of what you purchase or don't purchase makes a single but of difference when it comes to your insane tinfoil hat lies that you have used for your entire argument
Once again, pretending you aren't aware of production capacity leaves you right where you brainless rant started a long time ago.
You cover your tracks whining about ATI's initial price, which wasn't out of line either, and ignore nVidia's immediate crushing of it when the 680 came out, as you still complained about the performance increase there. You're a crybaby, that's it.
That's what you have done now for months on end, whined and whined and whined, and got caught over and over in exaggerations and lies, demanding a perfectly increasing price perf line slanting upwards, for years on end, lying about it's past, which I caught you on in the earlier reviews.
Well dummy, that's not how performance/price increases work in any area of computer parts, anyway.
Glad you're just another freaking parrot, as the reviewers have trained you fools to automaton levels.
Pontius - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
My only interest at the moment is OpenCL compute performance. Sad to see it's not working at the moment, but once they get the kinks worked out, I would really love to see some benchmarks.Also, as any GPGPU programmer knows, the number one bottleneck for GPU computing is randomly accessing memory. If you are working only within the on-chip local memory, then yes, you get blazingly fast speeds on a GPU. However, the second you do something as simple as a += on a global memory location, your performance grinds to a screeching halt. I would really like to see the performance of these cards on random memory heavy OpenCL benchmarks. Thanks for the review!
codedivine - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
We may do this in the future if I get some time off from univ work. Stay tuned :)Pontius - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Thanks codedevine, I'll keep an eye out.Pontius - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
My only interest at the moment is OpenCL compute performance. Sad to see it's not working at the moment, but once they get the kinks worked out, I would really love to see some benchmarks.Also, as any GPGPU programmer knows, the number one bottleneck for GPU computing is randomly accessing memory. If you are working only within the on-chip local memory, then yes, you get blazingly fast speeds on a GPU. However, the second you do something as simple as a += on a global memory location, your performance grinds to a screeching halt. I would really like to see the performance of these cards on random memory heavy OpenCL benchmarks. Thanks for the review!
Bat123Man - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
The Titan is nothing more than a proof-of-concept; "Look what we can do! Whohoo! Souped up to the max!" Nvidia is not intending this card to be for everyone. They know it will be picked up by a few well-moneyed enthusiasts, but it is really just a science project so that when people think about "the fastest GPU on the market", they think Nvidia.How often do you guys buy the best of the best as soon as it is out the door anyway ? $1000, $2000, it makes no difference, most of us wouldn't buy it even at 500 bucks. This is all about bragging rights, pure and simple.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Not exactly. The chip isn't fully enabled.