NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTThe Final Word On Overclocking
Before we jump into our performance breakdown, I wanted to take a few minutes to write a bit of a feature follow-up to our overclocking coverage from Tuesday. Since we couldn’t reveal performance numbers at the time – and quite honestly we hadn’t even finished evaluating Titan – we couldn’t give you the complete story on Titan. So some clarification is in order.
On Tuesday we discussed how Titan reintroduces overvolting for NVIDIA products, but now with additional details from NVIDIA along with our own performance data we have the complete picture, and overclockers will want to pay close attention. NVIDIA may be reintroducing overvolting, but it may not be quite what many of us were first thinking.
First and foremost, Titan still has a hard TDP limit, just like GTX 680 cards. Titan cannot and will not cross this limit, as it’s built into the firmware of the card and essentially enforced by NVIDIA through their agreements with their partners. This TDP limit is 106% of Titan’s base TDP of 250W, or 265W. No matter what you throw at Titan or how you cool it, it will not let itself pull more than 265W sustained.
Compared to the GTX 680 this is both good news and bad news. The good news is that with NVIDIA having done away with the pesky concept of target power versus TDP, the entire process is much simpler; the power target will tell you exactly what the card will pull up to on a percentage basis, with no need to know about their separate power targets or their importance. Furthermore with the ability to focus just on just TDP, NVIDIA didn’t set their power limits on Titan nearly as conservatively as they did on GTX 680.
The bad news is that while GTX 680 shipped with a max power target of 132%, Titan is again only 106%. Once you do hit that TDP limit you only have 6% (15W) more to go, and that’s it. Titan essentially has more headroom out of the box, but it will have less headroom for making adjustments. So hardcore overclockers dreaming of slamming 400W through Titan will come away disappointed, though it goes without saying that Titan’s power delivery system was never designed for that in the first place. All indications are that NVIDIA built Titan’s power delivery system for around 265W, and that’s exactly what buyers will get.
Second, let’s talk about overvolting. What we didn’t realize on Tuesday but realize now is that overvolting as implemented in Titan is not overvolting in the traditional sense, and practically speaking I doubt too many hardcore overclockers will even recognize it as overvolting. What we mean by this is that overvolting was not implemented as a direct control system as it was on past generation cards, or even the NVIDIA-nixed cards like the MSI Lightning or EVGA Classified.
Overvolting is instead a set of two additional turbo clock bins, above and beyond Titan’s default top bin. On our sample the top bin is 1.1625v, which corresponds to a 992MHz core clock. Overvolting Titan to 1.2 means unlocking two more bins: 1006MHz @ 1.175v, and 1019MHz @ 1.2v. Or put another way, overvolting on Titan involves unlocking only another 27MHz in performance.
These two bins are in the strictest sense overvolting – NVIDIA doesn’t believe voltages over 1.1625v on Titan will meet their longevity standards, so using them is still very much going to reduce the lifespan of a Titan card – but it’s probably not the kind of direct control overvolting hardcore overclockers were expecting. The end result is that with Titan there’s simply no option to slap on another 0.05v – 0.1v in order to squeak out another 100MHz or so. You can trade longevity for the potential to get another 27MHz, but that’s it.
Ultimately, this means that overvolting as implemented on Titan cannot be used to improve the clockspeeds attainable through the use of the offset clock functionality NVIDIA provides. In the case of our sample it peters out after +115MHz offset without overvolting, and it peters out after +115MHz offset with overvolting. The only difference is that we gain access to a further 27MHz when we have the thermal and power headroom available to hit the necessary bins.
| GeForce GTX Titan Clockspeed Bins | |||
| Clockspeed | Voltage | ||
| 1019MHz | 1.2v | ||
| 1006MHz | 1.175v | ||
| 992MHz | 1.1625v | ||
| 979MHz | 1.15v | ||
| 966MHz | 1.137v | ||
| 953MHz | 1.125v | ||
| 940MHz | 1.112v | ||
| 927MHz | 1.1v | ||
| 914MHz | 1.087v | ||
| 901MHz | 1.075v | ||
| 888MHz | 1.062v | ||
| 875MHz | 1.05v | ||
| 862MHz | 1.037v | ||
| 849MHz | 1.025v | ||
| 836MHz | 1.012v | ||
Finally, as with the GTX 680 and GTX 690, NVIDIA will be keeping tight control over what Asus, EVGA, and their other partners release. Those partners will have the option to release Titan cards with factory overclocks and Titan cards with different coolers (i.e. water blocks), but they won’t be able to expose direct voltage control or ship parts with higher voltages. Nor for that matter will they be able to create Titan cards with significantly different designs (i.e. more VRM phases); every Titan card will be a variant on the reference design.
This is essentially no different than how the GTX 690 was handled, but I think it’s something that’s important to note before anyone with dreams of big overclocks throws down $999 on a Titan card. To be clear, GPU Boost 2.0 is a significant improvement in the entire power/thermal management process compared to GPU Boost 1.0, and this kind of control means that no one needs to be concerned with blowing up their video card (accidentally or otherwise), but it’s a system that comes with gains and losses. So overclockers will want to pay close attention to what they’re getting into with GPU Boost 2.0 and Titan, and what they can and cannot do with the card.
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Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_1005&SUBSYS_103510DEI have no idea what a Tesla card's would be, though.
alpha754293 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
I don't suppose you would know how to tell the computer/OS that the card has a different PCI DevID other than what it actually is, would you?NVIDIA Tesla C2075 PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_1096
Hydropower - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_1022&SUBSYS_098210DE&REV_A1For the K20c.
brucethemoose - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
"This TDP limit is 106% of Titan’s base TDP of 250W, or 265W. No matter what you throw at Titan or how you cool it, it will not let itself pull more than 265W sustained."The value of the Titan isn't THAT bad at stock, but 106%? Is that a joke!?
Throw in an OC for OC comparison, and this card is absolutely ridiculous. Take the 7970 GE... 1250mhz is a good, reasonable 250mhz OC on air, a nice 20%-25% boost in performance.
The Titan review sample is probably the best case scenario and can go 27MHz past turbo speed, 115MHZ past base speed, so maybe 6%-10%. That $500 performance gap starts shrinking really, really fast once you OC, and for god sakes, if you're the kind of person who's buying a $1000 GPU, you shouldn't intend to leave it at stock speeds.
I hope someone can voltmod this card and actually make use of a waterblock, but there's another issue... Nvidia is obviously setting a precedent. Unless they change this OC policy, they won't be seeing any of my money anytime soon.
JarredWalton - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
As someone with a 7970GE, I can tell you unequivocally that 1250MHz on air is not at all a given. My card can handle many games at 1150MMhz, but other titles and applications (say, running some compute stuff) and I'm lucky to get stability for more than a day at 1050MHz. Perhaps with enough effort playing with voltage mods and such I could improve the situation, but I'm happier living with a card for a couple years that doesn't crap out because of excessively high voltages.CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
" After a few hours of trial and error, we settled on a base of the boost curve of 9,80 MHz, resulting in a peak boost clock of a mighty 1,123MHz; a 12 per cent increase over the maximum boost clock of the card at stock.Despite the 3GB of GDDR5 fitted on the PCB's rear lacking any active cooling it too proved more than agreeable to a little tweaking and we soon had it running at 1,652MHz (6.6GHz effective), a healthy ten per cent increase over stock.
With these 12-10 per cent increases in clock speed our in-game performance responded accordingly."
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2013/02/21/nvidia...
Oh well, 12 is 6 if it's nVidia bash time, good job mr know it all.
Hrel - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
YES! 1920x1080 has FINALLY arrived. It only took 6 years from when it became mainstream but it's FINALLY here! FINALLY! I get not doing it on this card, but can you guys PLEASE test graphics cards, especially laptop ones, at 1600x900 and 1280x720. A lot of the time when on a budget playing games at a lower resolution is a compromise you're more than willing to make in order to get decent quality settings. PLEASE do this for me, PLEASE!JarredWalton - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Um... we've been testing 1366x768, 1600x900, and 1920x1080 as our graphics standards for laptops for a few years now. We don't do 1280x720 because virtually no laptops have that as their native resolution, and stretching 720p to 768p actually isn't a pleasant result (a 6.7% increase in resolution means the blurring is far more noticeable). For desktop cards, I don't see much point in testing most below 1080p -- who has a desktop not running at least 1080p native these days? The only reason for 720p or 900p on desktops is if your hardware is too old/slow, which is fine, but then you're probably not reading AnandTech for the latest news on GPU performance.colonelclaw - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
I must admit I'm a little bit confused by Titan. Reading this review gives me the impression it isn't a lot more than the annual update to the top-of-the-line GPU from Nvidia.What would be really useful to visualise would be a graph plotting the FPS rates of the 480, 580, 680 and Titan along with their release dates. From this I think we would get a better idea of whether or not it's a new stand out product, or merely this year's '780' being sold for over double the price.
Right now I genuinely don't know if i should be holding Nvidia in awe or calling them rip-off merchants.
chizow - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link
From Anandtech's 7970 Review, you can see relative GPU die sizes:http://images.anandtech.com/doci/5261/DieSize.png
You'll also see the prices of these previous flagships has been mostly consistent, in the $500-650 range (except for a few outliers like the GTX 285 which came in hard economic times and the 8800Ultra, which was Nvidia's last ultra-premium card).
You an check some sites that use easy performance rating charts, like computerbase.de to get a quick idea of relative performance increases between generations, but you can quickly see that going from a new generation (not half-node) like G80 > GT200 > GF100 > GK100/110 should offer 50%+ increase, generally closer to the 80% range over the predecessor flagship.
Titan would probably come a bit closer to 100%, so it does outperform expectations (all of Kepler line did though), but it certainly does not justify the 2x increase in sticker price. Nvidia is trying to create a new Ultra-premium market without giving even a premium alternative. This all stems from the fact they're selling their mid-range part, GK104, as their flagship, which only occurred due to AMD's ridiculous pricing of the 7970.