NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTEarlier this week NVIDIA announced their new top-end single-GPU consumer card, the GeForce GTX Titan. Built on NVIDIA’s GK110 and named after the same supercomputer that GK110 first powered, the GTX Titan is in many ways the apex of the Kepler family of GPUs first introduced nearly one year ago. With anywhere between 25% and 50% more resources than NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 680, Titan is intended to be the ultimate single-GPU card for this generation.
Meanwhile with the launch of Titan NVIDIA has repositioned their traditional video card lineup to change who the ultimate video card will be chasing. With a price of $999 Titan is decidedly out of the price/performance race; Titan will be a luxury product, geared towards a mix of low-end compute customers and ultra-enthusiasts who can justify buying a luxury product to get their hands on a GK110 video card. So in many ways this is a different kind of launch than any other high performance consumer card that has come before it.
So where does that leave us? On Tuesday we could talk about Titan’s specifications, construction, architecture, and features. But the all-important performance data would be withheld another two days until today. So with Thursday finally upon us, let’s finish our look at Titan with our collected performance data and our analysis.
Titan: A Performance Summary
| GTX Titan | GTX 690 | GTX 680 | GTX 580 | |
| Stream Processors | 2688 | 2 x 1536 | 1536 | 512 |
| Texture Units | 224 | 2 x 128 | 128 | 64 |
| ROPs | 48 | 2 x 32 | 32 | 48 |
| Core Clock | 837MHz | 915MHz | 1006MHz | 772MHz |
| Shader Clock | N/A | N/A | N/A | 1544MHz |
| Boost Clock | 876Mhz | 1019MHz | 1058MHz | N/A |
| Memory Clock | 6.008GHz GDDR5 | 6.008GHz GDDR5 | 6.008GHz GDDR5 | 4.008GHz GDDR5 |
| Memory Bus Width | 384-bit | 2 x 256-bit | 256-bit | 384-bit |
| VRAM | 6GB | 2 x 2GB | 2GB | 1.5GB |
| FP64 | 1/3 FP32 | 1/24 FP32 | 1/24 FP32 | 1/8 FP32 |
| TDP | 250W | 300W | 195W | 244W |
| Transistor Count | 7.1B | 2 x 3.5B | 3.5B | 3B |
| Manufacturing Process | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 40nm |
| Launch Price | $999 | $999 | $499 | $499 |
On paper, compared to GTX 680, Titan offers anywhere between a 25% and 50% increase in resource. At the starting end, Titan comes with 25% more ROP throughput, a combination of Titan’s 50% increase in ROP count and simultaneous decrease in clockspeeds relative to GTX 680. Shading and texturing performance meanwhile benefits even more from the expansion of the number of SMXes, from 8 to 14. And finally, Titan has a full 50% more memory bandwidth than GTX 680.
Setting aside the unique scenario of compute for a moment, this means that Titan will be between 25% and 50% faster than GTX 680 in GPU limited situations, depending on the game/application and its mix of resource usage. For an industry and userbase still trying to come to terms with the loss of nearly annual half-node jumps, this kind of performance jump on the same node is quite remarkable. At the same time it also sets expectations for how future products may unfold; one way to compensate for the loss of the rapid cadence in manufacturing nodes is to spread out the gains from a new node over multiple years, and this is essentially what we’ve seen with the Kepler family by launching GK104, and a year later GK110.
In any case, while Titan can improve gaming performance by up to 50%, NVIDIA has decided to release Titan as a luxury product with a price roughly 120% higher than the GTX 680. This means that Titan will not be positioned to push the price of NVIDIA’s current cards down, and in fact it’s priced right off the currently hyper-competitive price-performance curve that the GTX 680/670 and Radeon HD 7970GE/7970 currently occupy.
| February 2013 GPU Pricing Comparison | |||||
| AMD | Price | NVIDIA | |||
| $1000 | GeForce Titan/GTX 690 | ||||
| (Unofficial) Radeon HD 7990 | $900 | ||||
| Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition | $450 | GeForce GTX 680 | |||
| Radeon HD 7970 | $390 | ||||
| $350 | GeForce GTX 670 | ||||
| Radeon HD 7950 | $300 | ||||
This setup isn’t unprecedented – the GTX 690 more or less created this precedent last May – but it means Titan is a very straightforward case of paying 120% more for 50% more performance; the last 10% always costs more. What this means is that the vast majority of gamers will simply be shut out from Titan at this price, but for those who can afford Titan’s $999 price tag NVIDIA believes they have put together a powerful card and a convincing case to pay for luxury.
So what can potential Titan buyers look forward to on the performance front? As always we’ll do a complete breakdown of performance in the following pages, but we wanted to open up this article with a quick summary of performance. So with that said, let’s take a look at some numbers.
| GeForce GTX Titan Performance Summary (2560x1440) | ||||||
| vs. GTX 680 | vs. GTX 690 | vs. R7970GE | vs. R7990 | |||
| Average | +47% | -15% | 34% | -19% | ||
| Dirt: Showdown | 47% | -5% | 3% | -38% | ||
| Total War: Shogun 2 | 50% | -15% | 62% | 1% | ||
| Hitman: Absolution | 34% | -15% | 18% | -15% | ||
| Sleeping Dogs | 49% | -15% | 17% | -30% | ||
| Crysis | 54% | -13% | 21% | -25% | ||
| Far Cry 3 | 35% | -23% | 37% | -15% | ||
| Battlefield 3 | 48% | -18% | 52% | -11% | ||
| Civilization V | 59% | -9% | 60% | 0 | ||
Looking first at NVIDIA’s product line, Titan is anywhere between 33% and 54% faster than the GTX 680. In fact with the exception of Hitman: Absolution, a somewhat CPU-bound benchmark, Titan’s performance relative to the GTX 680 is actually very consistent at a narrow 45%-55% range. Titan and GTX 680 are of course based on the same fundamental Kepler architecture, so there haven’t been any fundamental architecture changes between the two; Titan is exactly what you’d expect out of a bigger Kepler GPU. At the same time this is made all the more interesting due to the fact that Titan’s real-world performance advantage of 45%-55% is so close to its peak theoretical performance advantage of 50%, indicating that Titan doesn’t lose much (if anything) in efficiency when scaled up, and that the games we’re testing today favor memory bandwidth and shader/texturing performance over ROP throughput.
Moving on, while Titan offers a very consistent performance advantage over the architecturally similar GTX 680, it’s quite a different story when compared to AMD’s fastest single-GPU product, the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. As we’ve seen time and time again this generation, the difference in performance between AMD and NVIDIA GPUs not only varies with the test and settings, but dramatically so. As a result Titan is anywhere between being merely equal to the 7970GE to being nearly a generation ahead of it.
At the low-end of the scale we have DiRT: Showdown, where Titan’s lead is less than 3%. At the other end is Total War: Shogun 2, where Titan is a good 62% faster than the 7970GE. The average gain over the 7970GE is almost right in the middle at 34%, reflecting a mix of games where the two are close, the two are far, and the two are anywhere in between. With recent driver advancements having helped the 7970GE pull ahead of the GTX 680, NVIDIA had to work harder to take back their lead and to do so in an concrete manner.
Titan’s final competition are the dual-GPU cards of this generation, the GK104 based GTX 690, and the officially unofficial Tahiti based HD 7990 cards, which vary in specs but generally have just shy of the performance of a pair of 7970s. As we’ve seen in past generations, when it comes to raw performance one big GPU is no match for two smaller GPUs, and the same is true with Titan. For frames per second and nothing else, Titan cannot compete with those cards. But as we’ll see there are still some very good reasons for Titan’s existence, and areas Titan excels at that even two lesser GPUs cannot match.
None of this of course accounts for compute. Simply put, Titan stands alone in the compute world. As the first consumer GK110 GPU based video card there’s nothing quite like it. We’ll see why that is in our look at compute performance, but as far as the competitive landscape is concerned there’s not a lot to discuss here.
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ronin22 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
That's the point, it's not a gamerz cardFinally - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
"Titan delivers the kind of awe-inspiring performance we have come to expect from NVIDIA’s most powerful video cards."If you hear unfiltered Nvidia marketing speak like this, you know that AT isn't fooling around when it comes to earning their PR dollars. Well done!
Scritty - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Paper launch? Fine. I get that. But I suspect stock levels will be seriously limited. Rumour has it that only 10,000 of these will be made - which seems very odd as even with a substantial profit marging - the ROI on development costs is going to be hard to recoup with a potential sales level as low as that.I'm looking to buy a couple of these as soon as they are available for SLI - maybe 3 for a triple set up if possible, but I can see there being real issues with stock. I decent solution 3 screen at 2560x1440 for sure - if you can get hold of them anywhere.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Note that NVIDIA specifically shot down the 10K card rumor. As far as we've been advised and as best as we can tell, card availability will be similar to what we saw with the GTX 690. Which is to say tight at first, but generally available and will continue to be available.Egg - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
The chart on page 1 is missing a 'GB' under GTX Titan's VRAM listing. There aren't any 5760*1200 non-GE 7970 benchmarks. Also, on the Power, Temperature, and Noise page, "temperate" should be "temperature" just before the first chart.Additionally, the voltage issue HollyDOL and the strange Crysis Warhead 1080p E Shader/G Quality issue silverblue mentioned should be clarified as well. (I'm just repeating them here so they have a higher chance of being seen.)
Also, Wolfram|Alpha interprets "gigaflops" as "billion floating point operations per second" by default, while offering an alternative interpretation that doesn't have the seconds unit. Wikipedia also defines flops as already having the time unit. By their standards, flops/s is technically incorrect. I'm not scientist, and I actually didn't notice this until typed gigaflops into Wolfram|Alpha, so take this for what little it's worth.
It's silly to suggest that this card needs a voltmod and a waterblock. Very few people doing scientific work are going to be having time to do that. This card isn't intended to be a gaming card. Yes, there undoubtedly will be people on hwbot who would love to do such a thing, but relative to the population of scientists living on meager grants, they're small.
It's also silly to say that Titan is a bad card because it isn't as efficient as other cards at password hashing or bitcoin mining. These embarallel workloads aren't representative of scientific workloads. Besides, the most dedicated people have a custom FPGAs or ASICs for those workloads.
Saying that it shows Nvidia jacking up prices on its flagship is misleading. Yes, it's technically true. But I saw someone say that the GTX 680 was only a "midrange" card. The GTX 680 still competes with the Radeon 7970 GE. It isn't outright winning anymore - in certain games, it loses - and it's often substantially more expensive. But it's still reasonably competitive. Why did anyone expect Titan to push down GTX 680 prices? If anything, it might push down Tesla 20X prices, but I'm not holding my breath.
Would anyone have complained about Nvidia being outrageously greedy if Titan didn't exist in the consumer space at all?
(Moreover, the GTX 580 had FP64 performance at 1/8 FP32 performance, not Titan's 1/3. (http://www.anandtech.com/show/4008/nvidias-geforce...
Simply looking at the specs partially explains why the card is so damn expensive. It's 7.1 billion transistors, compared to the GTX 690's 2*3.5 billion transistors. (Page 1 on this article). Going purely by transistor count, Titan is underpriced, because it's just as expensive as the GTX 690. Looking at die area instead is less forgiving, but don't forget that squeezing 7 billion transistors on a single die is more difficult than having two 3.5 billion transistor dies. Titan also has 2 extra gigabytes of GDDR5.
The only valid criticism I've seen is that Titan can be outperformed by two 7970 GEs in certain, mostly FP32 compute workloads, which are a cheaper solution, especially for scientists who probably aren't as concerned with heat production as those working on the Titan supercomputer. After all, you can fit bigger fans in an EATX case than in most racks. 689 Gflops is still greater than 50% of 1309 Gflops; it's 53%. When you can find the cheapest 7970 GEs at a bit over $400, two 7970s will be about $200 cheaper.
But figure in power: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=200+W+*+1+yea... . After a year of continuous usage (or two years of 50% utilization), and assuming that two 7970 GEs will use 200 more watts than a Titan - a fairly reasonable estimate in my opinion - Wolfram|Alpha informs us that we'll have saved $216.
Not to mention the fact that two 7970s occupy around twice as much space as a Titan. That means you need more individual systems if you're looking to scale beyond a single workstation.
And finally, anyone who needs as much memory per GPU as they can get will need Titan.
It's hard to draw any real conclusions right now, though, with DirectCompute dubious and OpenCL broken. Great work on Nvidia's part, getting the drivers working...
There's also the fact that Nvidia is marketing this as a gaming card, which is disingenuous and poor practice. But come on, we all read Anandtech for a reason. Overhyped marketing is nothing new in technology.
So in conclusion - treat the GTX 680 as the flagship single-GPU consumer card. (They did call it a 680. See the GTX 580, 480, and 280.) It's in roughly in 7970GE's ballpark when it comes to price and performance. For gamers, Titan can effectively be ignored.
If you need FP32 compute performance, consider multiple 7970 GEs as well as Titan.
If you need FP64 compute performance, Titan is unparalleled, assuming you run it for a decent amount of time.
And if you're trying to set a world record, well, I guess you can pay through the nose for Titan too.
Insomniator - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Thank you, so many here just sound like butt hurt kids that do not understand these concepts or maybe didn't even read the article. Few of them would buy it at the $700 they cry about wanting it to be.This card is not just for gamers, and even if it were, performance wise it crushes the next closest single GPU competitor. Remember when Intel EE editions were $1k? The best always costs extra... and in this case the card isn't even being marketed soley for gamers anyway.
Until AMD puts out a new card that can beat it for cheaper, this will remain a $1k. Until then, the 680, 670, and 660 are all competitive products.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - link
Don't expect the crybaby fools to respond. They'd prefer to pretend your post isn't here.If they do say anything, it will just be another repetitious pile of tinfoil hat lies Charlie D will be proud of.
Olaf van der Spek - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Still only average framerates? :(I had hoped you'd move to minimum framerate / max frametime based benchmarking. Averages are (and were) kinda meaningless.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Actually we have some FRAPS data for a few of our games as a trial of some ideas. Unfortunately you won't see it for this article as there simply wasn't enough time to put that together on top of everything else. But keep your eyes peeled.GiantPandaMan - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
The Titan was a compute part, first and foremost. Gamers have much better alternatives in the 7970/680 route.Personally I think it's a pretty impressive piece of hardware, though there's no way in hell I'd ever buy it. That's because I'm a value oriented buyer and I don't have that much disposable income.
I just don't get all the indignation and outrage. It's not like nVidia screwed you over in some way. They had an expensive piece of hardware designed for compute and said to themselves, what the hell, why not release it for gamers?