NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTFinal Thoughts
Bringing things to a close, most of what we’ve seen with Titan has been a long time coming. Since the introduction of GK110 back at GTC 2012, we’ve had a solid idea of how NVIDIA’s grandest GPU would be configured, and it was mostly a question of when it would make its way to consumer hands, and at what clockspeeds and prices.
The end result is that with the largest Kepler GPU now in our hands, the performance situation closely resembles the Fermi and GT200 generations. Which is to say that so long as you have a solid foundation to work from, he who builds the biggest GPU builds the most powerful GPU. And at 551mm2, once more NVIDIA is alone in building massive GPUs.
No one should be surprised then when we proclaim that GeForce GTX Titan has unquestionably reclaimed the single-GPU performance crown for NVIDIA. It’s simply in a league of its own right now, reaching levels of performance no other single-GPU card can touch. At best, at its very best, AMD’s Radeon HD 7970GE can just match Titan, which is quite an accomplishment for AMD, but then at Titan’s best it’s nearly a generation ahead of the 7970GE. Like its predecessors, Titan delivers the kind of awe-inspiring performance we have come to expect from NVIDIA’s most powerful video cards.
With that in mind, as our benchmark data has shown, Titan’s performance isn’t quite enough to unseat this generation’s multi-GPU cards like the GTX 690 or Radeon HD 7990. But with that said this isn’t a new situation for us, and we find our editorial stance has not changed: we still suggest single-GPU cards over multi-GPU cards when performance allows for it. Multi-GPU technology itself is a great way to improve performance beyond what a single GPU can do, but as it’s always beholden to the need for profiles and the inherent drawbacks of AFR rendering, we don’t believe it’s desirable in situations such as Titan versus the GTX 690. The GTX 690 may be faster, but Titan is going to deliver a more consistent experience, just not quite at the same framerates as the GTX 690.
Meanwhile in the world of GPGPU computing Titan stands alone. Unfortunately we’re not able to run a complete cross-platform comparison due to Titan’s outstanding OpenCL issue, but from what we have been able to run Titan is not only flat-out powerful, but NVIDIA has seemingly delivered on their compute efficiency goals, giving us a Kepler family part capable of getting far closer to its theoretical efficiency than GTX 680, and closer than any other GPU before it. We’ll of course be taking a further look at Titan in comparison to other GPUs once the OpenCL situation is resolved in order to come to a better understanding of its relative strengths and weaknesses, but for the first wave of Titan buyers I’m not sure that’s going to matter. If you’re doing GPU computing, are invested in CUDA, and need a fast compute card, then Titan is the compute card CUDA developers and researchers have been dreaming of.
Back in the land of consumer gaming though, we have to contend with the fact that unlike any big-GPU card before it, Titan is purposely removed from the price/performance curve. NVIDIA has long wanted to ape Intel’s ability to have an extreme/luxury product at the very top end of the consumer product stack, and with Titan they’re going ahead with that.
The end result is that Titan is targeted at a different demographic than GTX 580 or other such cards, a demographic that has the means and the desire to purchase such a product. Being used to seeing the best video cards go for less we won’t call this a great development for the competitive landscape, but ultimately this is far from the first luxury level computer part, so there’s not much else to say other than that this is a product for a limited audience. But what that limited audience is getting is nothing short of an amazing card.
Like the GTX 690, NVIDIA has once again set the gold standard for GPU construction, this time for a single-GPU card. GTX 680 was a well-built card, but next to Titan it suddenly looks outdated. For example, despite Titan’s significantly higher TDP it’s no louder than the GTX 680, and the GTX 680 was already a quiet card. Next to price/performance the most important metric is noise, and by focusing on build quality NVIDIA has unquestionably set the new standard for high-end, high-TDP video cards.
On a final note, normally I’m not one for video card gimmicks, but after having seen both of NVIDIA’s Titan concept systems I have to say NVIDIA has taken an interesting route in justifying the luxury status of Titan. With the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition only available with open air or exotic cooling, Titan has been put into a position where it’s the ultimate blower card by a wide margin. The end result is that in scenarios where blowers are preferred and/or required, such as SFF PCs or tri-SLI, Titan is even more of an improvement over the competition than it is for traditional desktop computers. Or as Anand has so eloquently put it with his look at Falcon Northwest’s Tiki, when it comes to Titan “The days of a high end gaming rig being obnoxiously loud are thankfully over.”
Wrapping things up, on Monday we’ll be taking a look at the final piece of the puzzle: Origin’s tri-SLI full tower Genesis PC. The Genesis has been an interesting beast for its use of water cooling with Titan, and with the Titan launch behind us we can now focus on what it takes to feed 3 Titan video cards and why it’s an impeccable machine for multi-monitor/surround gaming. So until then, stay tuned.
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CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - link
I really don't understand that mentality you have. I'm surrounded by thousands of dollars of computer parts and I certainly don't consider myself some sort of hardware enthusiast or addicted overclocker, or insane gamer.Yet this card is easily a consideration, since several other systems have far more than a thousand dollars in them on just the basics. It's very easy to spend a couple thousand even being careful.
I don't get what the big deal is. The current crop of top end cards before this are starkly inadequate at common monitor resolutions.
One must nearly ALWAYS turn down features in the popular benched games to be able to play.
People just don't seem to understand that I guess. I have untold thousands of dollars in many computers and the only thing that will make them really gaming capable at cheap monitor resolutions is a card like this.
Cripes my smartphone cost a lot more than the former top two cards just below Titan.
This is the one area that comes to mind ( the only one that exists as far as I can tell) where the user is left with "my modern computer can't do it" - and that means, take any current taxing game (lots of those - let's say 50% of those reviewed as a rough thumb) and you're stuck unable to crank it up.
Now 120hz monitors are becoming common, so this issue is increased.
As you may have noticed, another poster exclaimed:
" Finally ! 1920x1080 a card that can do it ! "
There's the flat out closest to the truth, and I agree with that entirely, at least for this moment, as I stated here before the 7970 didn't do it when it was released and doesn't now and won't ever. (neither does the 680)
I'm trying to deny it, but really it is already clear that the Titan doesn't cut it for everything at the above rez either, not really, and not at higher refresh rates.
More is still needed, and this is the spot that is lacking for gamers, the video card.
This card is the card to have, and it's not about bragging, it's about firing up your games and not being confronted with the depressing "turn off the eyecandy" and check the performance again... see if that is playable...
I mean ****, that apparently does not bother any of you, and I do not know why.
Everything else in your system is capable...
This is an IMPORTANT PART that actually completes the package, where the end user isn't compromising.
HighTech4US - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
If it does could we see a new story on performance using NVENC across the entire Kepler line along with any FREEware/PAYware software that utilizes it. I have an older Intel Q8300 that is used as my HTPC/Living Room Gaming System and encoding videos take a long time just using the CPU cores.If getting a Kepler GPU and using NVENC can speed up encoding significantly I would like to know. As that would be the lowest cost upgrade along with getting a Gaming card upgrade.
Thanks
Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Yes, NVEnc is present.lkuzmanov - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
excellent! now make it 30-40% cheaper and I'm on board.Zink - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Rahul Garg picked the lowest HD 7970 scores in both cases from the Matsumoto et al. paper. The other higher GFLOPS scores represent performance using alternate kernels performing the same calculation on the same hardware as far as I can tell. Rahul needs to justify choosing only the lowest HD 7970 numbers in his report or I can only assume he is tilting the numbers in favor of Titan.JarredWalton - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Picking the highest scoring results that are using optimized cores and running on different hardware in the first place (e.g. not the standard test bed) would be tilting the results very far in AMD's favor. A default run is basically what Titan gets to do, so the same for 7970 would make sense.codedivine - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
The different algorithms are actually not performing the exact same calculation. There are differences in matrix layouts and memory allocations. We chose the ones that are closest to the layouts and allocations we were testing on the Titan.In the future, we intend to test with AMD's official OpenCL BLAS. While Matsumoto's numbers are good for illustrative purposes. We would prefer running our own benchmarks on our own testbeds, and on real-world code which will typically use AMD's BLAS for AMD cards. AMD's OpenCL BLAS performance is actually a little bit lower than Matsumoto's numbers so I don't think we tilted the numbers in AMD's favour. If anything, we gave AMD a bit of benefit-of-the-doubt here.
In the same vein, faster results than Nvidia's CUBLAS have been demonstrated on Nvidia hardware. However, we chose to test only using CUBLAS as all production code will typically use CUBLAS due to its reliability and support from Nvidia.
AMD's OpenCL BLAS is a bit complicated to setup correctly and in my research, I have had problems with stability with it on Windows. Thus, we avoided it in this particular review but we will likely look at it in the future.
Zink - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Thanks, shouldn't have doubted you :)Nfarce - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
...about my 680 purchase last April (nearly a year ago already, wow). Was so worried I made the wrong decision replacing two 570s knowing the Kepler was less than a year away. The news on this card has firmed up my decision to lock in with a second 680 now for moving up to a 2560x1440 monitor.Very *very* disappointing, Nvidia.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
The new top card has been near the same as two of the former cards FOREVER.You people are nothing short of stupid nut jobs.
There are not enough tampons at Johnson and Johnson warehouses for this thread.
THE VERY SAME RATIO has occurred every time for all the prior launches.