NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTCrysis: Warhead
Up next is our legacy title for 2013, Crysis: Warhead. The stand-alone expansion to 2007’s Crysis, at over 4 years old Crysis: Warhead can still beat most systems down. Crysis was intended to be future-looking as far as performance and visual quality goes, and it has clearly achieved that. We’ve only finally reached the point where single-GPU cards have come out that can hit 60fps at 1920 with 4xAA.
At 2560 we still have a bit of a distance to go before any single-GPU card can crack 60fps. In lieu of that Titan is the winner as expected. Leading the GTX 680 by 54%, this is Titan’s single biggest win over its predecessor, actually exceeding the theoretical performance advantage based on the increase in functional units alone. For some reason GTX 680 never did gain much in the way of performance here versus the GTX 580, and while it’s hard to argue that Titan has reversed that, it has at least corrected some of the problem in order to push more than 50% out.
In the meantime, with GTX 680’s languid performance, this has been a game the latest Radeon cards have regularly cleared. For whatever reason they’re a good match for Crysis, meaning even with all its brawn, Titan can only clear the 7970GE by 21%.
On the other hand, our multi-GPU cards are a mixed bag. Once more Titan loses to both, but the GTX 690 only leads by 15% thanks to GK104’s aforementioned weak Crysis performance. Meanwhile the 7990 takes a larger lead at 33%.
I’d also note that we’ve thrown in a “bonus round” here just to see when Crysis will be playable at 1080p with its highest settings and with 4x SSAA for that picture-perfect experience. As it stands AMD multi-GPU cards can already cross 60fps, but for everything else we’re probably a generation off yet before Crysis is completely and utterly conquered.
Moving on, we once again have minimum framerates for Crysis.
When it comes to Titan, the relative improvement in minimum framerates over GTX 680 is nothing short of obscene. Whatever it was that was holding back GTX 680 is clearly having a hard time slowing down Titan, leading to Titan offering 71% better minimum framerates. There’s clearly much more going on here than just an increase in function units.
Meanwhile, though Titan’s gains here over the 7970GE aren’t quite as high as they were with the GTX 680, the lead over the 7970GE still grows a bit to 26%. As for our mutli-GPU cards, this appears to be a case where SLI is struggling; the GTX 690 is barely faster than Titan here. Though at 31% faster than Titan, the 7990 doesn’t seem to be faltering much.
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CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Stop whining along with the rest of them, grow a set, get a job, and buy two of them.Might do you some good.
Alucard291 - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
Unlike you, I have a job :)chizow - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
Good point, I'd tend to agree with that assessment as anyone who actually works for their money would not be so eager to part with it so quickly in $1K denominations for what amounts to a glorified pinball machine.He's probably a kid who has never had to work a day in his life or a basement dweller who has no hope of ever buying one of these anyways.
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
And now with the pure troll, the lying idiot conspiracist nVidia hater takes on the pure personal attack for a big fat ZERO score.Congratulations, you and your pure troll can high five each other and both be wrong anyway, for another yer or two, or the rest of your whining crybaby posting PC herd idiot mentality lives.
Alucard291 - Friday, March 8, 2013 - link
No no kid. You're the "pure troll here"So yeah go get a job and buy two of them. For yourself. Stop being angry at us for not being able to afford it
~lol~
wiyosaya - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
While I understand your frustrations, IMHO, this is a card aimed at those wanting the compute performance of a Tesla at 1/3 the cost. As I see it, nVidia shot themselves in the foot for compute performance with the 680, and as such, I bet that 680 sales were less than expected primarily because of its crappy compute performance in comparison to say even a 580. This may have been their strategy, though, as they might have expected $3,500 Teslas to fly off the shelf.I am also willing to bet that Teslas did not fly off the shelf, and that in order to maintain good sales, they have basically dropped the price of the first GK110s to something that is reasonable with this card. Once can now buy 3.5 Titan's for the price of the entry level GK110 Tesla, and I highly expect nVidia to make a profit rather than the killing that they might have thought possible on the GK110 Teslas.
That said, I bet that nVidia gets a sht load of orders for this card from new HPC builders and serious CAD/CAE workstation suppliers. Many CAD/CAE software packages like SolidWorks and Maple support GPGPUs in their code making this card a bargain for their builds.
My apologies, to all the gamers here but us compute nerds are drooling over this card. I only wish I could afford one to put in my i7-3820 build from July. It is more than 2x what I paid for a 580 back then, and the 580 buy was for its compute performance.
atlr - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
wiyosaya, I am trying to come up to speed on comparing compute performance between Nvidia and AMD options. Is the Titan drool-worthy only for software that only uses CUDA and not OpenCL? This reminds me of the days of Glide versus OpenGL APIs.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...
chizow - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
That's an awesome analysis by PCPer, thanks for linking that. Might end up being the biggest driver cheat scandal in history. Runt framesgate lol.CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
HUGE amd cheat.It's their standard operating procedure.
The fanboys will tape their mouths, gouge out their eyes and stick fingers in their ears and chant: "I'm not listening".