NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTFar Cry 3
The final new game added to the latest rendition of our benchmark suite is Far Cry 3, Ubisoft’s recently released island-jungle action game. A lot like our other jungle game Crysis, Far Cry 3 can be quite tough on GPUs, especially with MSAA and improved alpha-to-coverage checking thrown into the mix. On the other hand it’s still a bit of a pig on the CPU side, and seemingly inexplicably we’ve found that it doesn’t play well with HyperThreading on our testbed, making this the only game we’ve ever had to disable HT for to maximize our framerates.
For the 7970GE and GTX 680, FC3 at 2560 was already a very close match. Or put another way, with the 7970GE and GTX 680 tied up with each other, Titan is free to clear the both of them by approximately 35% each at 2560. This is enough to launch Titan past the 60fps mark, the first for any single-GPU card.
As for our other resolutions, it’s interesting to note that the gains at both 5760 and 1920 with MSAA are actually greater than at 2560. As we mentioned before Far Cry is somewhat demanding on the CPU side of things, so Titan may not be fully stretching out at 2560. In which case the performance gains due to Titan would be closer to 45-50%.
Moving on to our multi-GPU cards, this is something of a mixed bag. Titan isn’t close to winning, but GTX 690 wins by under 30%, and 7990 by just 17%. This is despite the fact that SLI/CF scaling is as strong as it is. At the same time Far Cry 3 is a good contemporary reminder of just what Titan can excel at: had Titan been out in 2012, it would have been doing roughly this well while NVIDIA would have still been hammering out their SLI profiles for this game. Multi-GPU cards are powerful, but they are forever reliant on waiting for profiles to unlock their capabilities.
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Tetracycloide - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
That's the thing, it's not a 'consumer gaming card.' It's a consumer compute card. Obviously the price for performance for gaming makes no sense but that's not their target market.ronin22 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
This exactly!It's an amazing card for computing.
I wish I could get one...
Blazorthon - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
In reply to both of your comments, I have to ask this: If that is justification for its price, then why is it that AMD doesn't have their Tahiti cards priced like that and why didn't Nvidia price their previous consumer compute cards like that (GTX 280, GTX 285, GTX 480, GTX 580, etc.)?CommandoCATS - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link
Because this seems like a specialized thing for people who care about compute tasks within NVidia's CUDA universe (and things like iRay, which didn't exist when previous generations first came out).The truth is that in academia and research, CUDA is still the top dog (just do a google scholar search). I'm sure for most gamers, the GTX 680 is the way better deal. However, this is essentially a Tesla K20 for 1/3rd of the cost, so it's kind of a bargain from that perspective.
cheersloss - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Exactly right. There is nothing about this card that is a value. The same compute functions were there in the older flagships as well, the gtx 580, 480, 280 etc.Titan is just an overpriced, overhyped trainwreck. Another attempt at a cashgrab on the gullible.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
The gullible that have the several thousands of extra they can spend that you don't have and cannot spend.Certainly poorboy feels better after having called his superiors gullible. The jelly is seeping through at an extraordinary rate.
cheersloss - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Exactly right. There is nothing about this card that is a value. The same compute functions were there in the older flagships as well, the gtx 580, 480, 280 etc.Titan is just an overpriced, overhyped trainwreck. Another attempt at a cashgrab on the gullible.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
LOLGood you run the 280, and I'll run the Titan, and we can be equal and best friends, and I'll tell you over and over all the benchmarks and games and fps scores and compute tests are lying and your 280 is just as good and the same and you're right and I wish so badly that I was as poor as you and just bought a used 3 gen back nVidia card, but they fooled me, the gullible gamer.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - link
ROFL - aww poor baby, now tessellation and compute is a total loss for amd, too as you conveniently forgot to include the 680, 670 660Ti 660 650Ti 650. hahahahha u people suck.So I can buy 2 amd cards that crash and don't run CF at all 33% of the time, or I can buy the most awesome top card in the entire world of gaming and play all the titles and be just great, or I can buy 2 nVidia cards and SLI them and have every game run except correctly except 1 while amd CF fails often...
I can buy the most stable, fully featured, many more featured nVidia card, or I can buy the dying no catalyst driver writers worth their salt (fired for savings) or left for better waters or headhunted, crashing piece of rotten unsupported glitching amd crap.
$999 looks like a bargain basement price to me. I can hardly wait to own The Shield, too.
Innovation. Awesomeness. New features. Unified drivers THAT JUST WORK.
Features ported BACKWARDS to prior generations.
Cuda
PhysX
Frame Rate Target
Boost
Stable dual card setups
Same game day drivers
Honest company not cheating liars like amd
I BUILT THIS co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang current CEO, a perfect example of the awesomeness of capitalism and personal success and the American Dream in REAL LIFE. lol
( Oh I bet those little OWS activist amd fanboys we have here are shooting blood through every pore)
Why in the world would I buy an amd card ? There's only one reason - to try to save a dying loser in a kind act of CHARITY - and frankly, what we have for amd fanboys is nothing short of the most evil little penny pinching crying whining baby SCROOGES I have ever seen.
So we can FORGET IT when it comes to the amd fanboy rabble here supporting AMD - they support only their own selfish fanboy agenda and psychotic public pocketbook panhandling.
I'd like to thank TheJian for pointing out amd fail coverage, vs the ignoring of the nVidia FINANCIAL SUCCESS STORY:
amd Q earnings coverage
"
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5465/amd-q411-fy-201...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5764/amd-q112-earnin...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6383/amd-q3-2012-ear...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6690/amd-q412-and-fy...
"
nVidia Q earnings coverage
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6746/tegra-4-shipmen...
LOL - let it burn you crybabies to the CORE, I hope blood shoots from your eyes...
xaml - Sunday, March 3, 2013 - link
Don't leave out the biggest "crybaby" of all, yourself.