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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chizow - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link
Idiot...has the top end card cost 2x as much every time? Of course not!!! Or we'd be paying $100K for GPUs!!!CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Stop being an IDIOT.What is the cost of the 7970 now, vs what I paid for it at release, you insane gasbag ?
You seem to have a brainfart embedded in your cranium, maybe you should go propose to Charlie D.
chizow - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
It's even cheaper than it was at launch, $380 vs. $550, which is the natural progression....parts at a certain performance level get CHEAPER as new parts are introduced to the market. That's called progress. Otherwise there would be NO INCENTIVE to *upgrade* (look this word up please, it has meaning).You will not pay the same money for the same performance unless the part breaks down, and semiconductors under normal usage have proven to be extremely venerable components. People expect progress, *more* performance at the same price points. People will not pay increasing prices for things that are not essential to life (like gas, food, shelter), this is called the price inelasticity of demand.
This is a basic lesson in business, marketing, and economics applied to the semiconductor/electronics industry. You obviously have no formal training in any of the above disciplines, so please stop commenting like a ranting and raving idiot about concepts you clearly do not understand.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
They're ALREADY SOLD OUT STUPID IDIOT THEORIST.LOL
The true loser, an idiot fool, wrong before he's done typing, the "education" is his brainwashed fried gourd Charlie D OWNZ.
chizow - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
And? There's going to be some demand for this card just as there was demand for the 690, it's just going to be much lower based on the price tag than previous high-end cards. I never claimed anything otherwise.I outlined the expectations, economics, and buying decisions in general for the tech industry and in general, they hold true. Just look around and you'll get plenty of confirmation where people (like me) who previously bought 1, 2, 3 of these $500-650 GPUs are opting to pass on a single Titanic at $1000.
Nvidia's introduction of an "ultra-premium" range is an unsustainable business model because it assumes Nvidia will be able to sustain this massive performance lead over AMD. Not to mention they will have a harder time justifying the price if their own next-gen offering isn't convincingly faster.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - link
You're not the nVidia CEO nor their bean counter, you whacked out fool.You're the IDIOT that babbles out stupid concepts with words like "justifying", as you purport to be an nVidia marketing hired expert.
You're not. You're a disgruntled indoctrinated crybaby who can't move on with the times, living in a false past, and waiting for a future not here yet.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
The article's first page has the word luxury appearing five times. The blurb, which I read prior to reading the article's first page has luxury appearing twice.That is 7 uses of the word in just a bit over one page.
Let me guess... it's a luxury product?
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - link
It's stupid if you ask me. But that's this place, not very nVidia friendly after their little didn't get the new 98xx fiasco, just like Tom's.A lot of these top tier cards are a luxury, not just the Titan, as one can get by with far less, the problem is, the $500 cards fail often at 1920x resolution, and this one perhaps can be said to have conquered just that, so here we have a "luxury product" that really can't do it's job entirely, or let's just say barely, maybe, as 1920X is not a luxury resolution.
Turn OFF and down SOME in game features, and that's generally, not just extreme case.
People are fools though, almost all the time. Thus we have this crazed "reviews" outlook distortion, and certainly no such thing as Never Settle.
We're ALWAYS settling when it comes to video card power.
araczynski - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
too bad there's not a single game benchmark in that whole article that I give 2 squirts about. throw in some RPG's please, like witcher/skyrim.Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
We did test Skyrim only to ultimately pass on it for a benchmark. The problem with Skyrim (and RPGs in general) is that they're typically CPU limited. In this case our charts would be nothing but bar after bar at roughly 90fps, which wouldn't tell us anything meaningful about the GPU.