NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTSynthetics
As always we’ll also take a quick look at synthetic performance to get a better look at Titan’s underpinnings. These tests are mostly for comparing cards from within a manufacturer, as opposed to directly comparing AMD and NVIDIA cards. We’ll start with 3DMark Vantage’s Pixel Fill test.
Pixel fill is a mix of a ROP test and a test to see if you have enough bandwidth to feed those ROPs. At the same time the smallest increase in theoretical performance for Titan over GTX 680 was in ROP performance, where a 50% increase in ROPs was met with a minor clockspeed reduction for a final increase in ROP performance of 25%.
The end result is that with gains of 28%, Titan’s lead over GTX 680 is just a hair more than its increase in theoretical ROP performance. Consequently at first glance it looks like Titan has enough memory and cache bandwidth to feed its 48 ROPs, which given where we’re at today with GDDR5 is good news as GDDR5 has very nearly run out of room.
Moving on, we have our 3DMark Vantage texture fillrate test, which does for texels and texture mapping units what the previous test does for ROPs.
Oddly enough, despite the fact that Titan’s texture performance improvements over GTX 680 were only on the range of 46%, here Titan is measured as having 62% more texturing performance. This may be how Titan is interplaying with its improved bandwidth, or it may be a case where some of the ancillary changes NVIDIA made to the texture paths for compute are somehow also beneficial to proper texturing performance.
Finally we’ll take a quick look at tessellation performance with TessMark.
Unsurprisingly, Titan is well ahead of anything else NVIDIA produces. At 49% faster it’s just a bit over the 46% theoretical performance improvement we would expect from the increased number of Polymorph Engines the extra 6 SMXes bring. Interestingly, as fast as GTX 580’s tessellation performance was, these results would indicate that Titan offers more than a generational jump in tessellation performance, nearly tripling GTX 580’s tessellation performance. Though at this time it’s not at all clear just what such tessellation performance is good for, as we seem to be reaching increasingly ridiculous levels.
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CeriseCogburn - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
Enlightenment comes slow to the angry activist conspiracist tinfoil hatter, but it appears you've made progress.Another REASON $999 is the correct price.
Suck it up loser.
Sabresiberian - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - link
You know, there are some reasonable arguments against this card, but you have to take it to an AMD fanboy level by calling it an overpriced GTX 680.iSlayer - Saturday, March 30, 2013 - link
Titan gets pretty close to 690/680 SLI performance while using less power, producing less heat, and freeing up space for 3 additional Titans. With Titan, I can make a machine up to 60% more powerful than was previously possible. Sure, it's going to cost twice as much as it would to get the same performance from other cards, but that's only theoretical as you literally cannot match a Titan config with a single computer.You seem to have entirely missed the point of this card.
klepp0906 - Friday, February 21, 2014 - link
if you thought the titan was a troll, i'd hate to see what you call their latest attempt w/ the titan black, free of the artificial limitations put in place just so they can make another money grab. (all while the driver support on the older card still falls flat on its face in many cases ie: surround)ehpexs - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Nvidia has been so greedy with 600 series. 560s turned into 680s and now this. Nvidia is not getting my money for years.HighTech4US - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
> Nvidia has been so greedy with 600 series. 560s turned into 680s and now this. Nvidia is not getting my money for years.So you instead gave your money to greedy AMD and their $549 HD7970 last January or did you wait for AMD to become less greedy when they had to reduce the price by $120 because of the greedy Nvidia releasing the GTX680.
chizow - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Yes AMD started this all with their ridiculous 7970 prices, but Nvidia has taken it way beyond that. $1K is usury, plain and simple.Hrel - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Haha, never seen anyone use the word "usury" in real life before. You used it kinda wrong but your point came across. Nice!chizow - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link
It's contemporary usage has extended beyond the traditional references to loans/interest, if you replace "interest" with "premium" it makes perfect sense. But glad you understood and enjoyed the reference.mlambert890 - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
It's a ridiculous usage honestly. The sense of entitlement people have is almost incomprehensible that there is moral outrage over an expensive video card.If you feel its a bad deal, don't buy it. If you feel that somehow NVidia has committed a sin against nature by releasing the 680 originally (which is somehow now being viewed as "broken" I guess.. amazing) and then releasing this card at $1000, because you feel that this card should have *been* the 680, then you are making assumptions without any evidence.
Everyone seems to be basing their angst on the notion that NVidia *could* be selling this card right now at $500. How does *anyone* know this? It's faith based insanity. No one knows what their yields are on this thing yet all of the disgruntled are going out on some wild limb screaming because they feel this card could have come out last year for half price.