NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTHitman: Absolution
The third game in our revised lineup is Hitman: Absolution. The latest game in Square Enix’s stealth-action series, Hitman: Absolution is a DirectX 11 based title that though a bit heavy on the CPU, can give most GPUs a run for their money. Furthermore it has a built-in benchmark, which gives it a level of standardization that fewer and fewer benchmarks possess.
Based on our results I suspect Hitman is CPU limited beyond 85fps or so, which is depressing our results on these extremely powerful cards. Titan is by far the fastest of the single-GPU cards, but at 2560 it only beats the GTX 680 by 34%, and the 7970GE by 18%. If we jump up to 5760 we can see that Titan pulls ahead by more, now 48% and 33% respectively, and this is probably the most pure GPU result we’re going to get out of Hitman.
Note that the dual-GPU cards still do better than Titan here, but they are running right into the wall presented by the CPU bottleneck. Their 17% leads are nothing to scoff at, but it may not be all they’re capable of.
Meanwhile thanks to its built-in benchmark, Hitman is one of the most consistent games in our lineup, making it a good candidate for including the minimum framerate, which we have below.
The minimum framerates on Hitman show Titan in an even better light. Though it still loses to the dual-GPU configurations, it’s now 40% ahead of the GTX 680 and 25% ahead of the 7970GE respectively. And amusingly enough, at 2560 Titan is just fast enough to hit 60fps minimum.
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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".