NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTCrysis: Warhead
Up next is our legacy title for 2013, Crysis: Warhead. The stand-alone expansion to 2007’s Crysis, at over 4 years old Crysis: Warhead can still beat most systems down. Crysis was intended to be future-looking as far as performance and visual quality goes, and it has clearly achieved that. We’ve only finally reached the point where single-GPU cards have come out that can hit 60fps at 1920 with 4xAA.
At 2560 we still have a bit of a distance to go before any single-GPU card can crack 60fps. In lieu of that Titan is the winner as expected. Leading the GTX 680 by 54%, this is Titan’s single biggest win over its predecessor, actually exceeding the theoretical performance advantage based on the increase in functional units alone. For some reason GTX 680 never did gain much in the way of performance here versus the GTX 580, and while it’s hard to argue that Titan has reversed that, it has at least corrected some of the problem in order to push more than 50% out.
In the meantime, with GTX 680’s languid performance, this has been a game the latest Radeon cards have regularly cleared. For whatever reason they’re a good match for Crysis, meaning even with all its brawn, Titan can only clear the 7970GE by 21%.
On the other hand, our multi-GPU cards are a mixed bag. Once more Titan loses to both, but the GTX 690 only leads by 15% thanks to GK104’s aforementioned weak Crysis performance. Meanwhile the 7990 takes a larger lead at 33%.
I’d also note that we’ve thrown in a “bonus round” here just to see when Crysis will be playable at 1080p with its highest settings and with 4x SSAA for that picture-perfect experience. As it stands AMD multi-GPU cards can already cross 60fps, but for everything else we’re probably a generation off yet before Crysis is completely and utterly conquered.
Moving on, we once again have minimum framerates for Crysis.
When it comes to Titan, the relative improvement in minimum framerates over GTX 680 is nothing short of obscene. Whatever it was that was holding back GTX 680 is clearly having a hard time slowing down Titan, leading to Titan offering 71% better minimum framerates. There’s clearly much more going on here than just an increase in function units.
Meanwhile, though Titan’s gains here over the 7970GE aren’t quite as high as they were with the GTX 680, the lead over the 7970GE still grows a bit to 26%. As for our mutli-GPU cards, this appears to be a case where SLI is struggling; the GTX 690 is barely faster than Titan here. Though at 31% faster than Titan, the 7990 doesn’t seem to be faltering much.
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CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Here you are arac, some places can do things this place claims it cannot.See the massive spanking amd suffers.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2013/02/21/nvidia...
That's beyond a 40% lead for the nvidia Titan above and beyond the amd flagship. LOL
No problem. No cpu limited crap. I guess some places know how to test.
TITAN 110 min 156 max
7970ghz 72 min 94 max
TheJian - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
Jeez, I wish I had read your post before digging up my links. Yours is worse than mine making my point on skyrim even more valid.In your link the GTX670 takes out the 7970ghz even at 2560x1200. I thought all these dumb NV cards were bandwidth limited ;) Clear separation on all cards in this "cpu limited" benchmark on ALL resolutions.
Hold on let me wrap my head around this...So with your site, and my 3 links to skyrim benchmarks in my posts (one of them right here at anandtech telling how to add gfx, their 7970ghz article), 3/4 of them showing separations according to their GPU class...Doesn't that mean they are NOT cpu bound? Am I missing something here? :) Are you wondering if Ryan benched skyrim with the hi-res pack after it came out, found it got smacked around by NV and dropped it? I mean he's claiming he tested it right above your post and found skyrim cpu limited. Is he claiming he didn't think adding a HI-RES PACK that's official would NOT add graphical slowdowns? This isn't a LOW-RES pack right?
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6025/radeon-hd-7970-...
Isn't that Ryan's article:
"We may have to look at running extra graphics effects (e.g. TrSSAA/AAA) to thin the herd in the future."...Yep I think that's his point. PUT IN THE FREAKIN PACK. Because Skyrim didn't just become worthless as a benchmark as TONS are playing it, unlike Crysis Warhead and Dirt Showdown. Which you can feel free to check the server link I gave, nobody playing Warhead today either. I don't think anyone ever played Showdown to begin with (unlike warhead which actually was fun in circa 2008).
http://www.vgchartz.com/game/23202/crysis-warhead/
Global sales .01mil...That's a decimal point right?
http://www.vgchartz.com/game/70754/dirt-showdown/
It hasn't reached enough sales to post the decimal point. Heck xbox360 only sold 140K units globally. Meanwhile:
http://www.vgchartz.com/game/49111/the-elder-scrol...
2.75million sold (that's not a decimal any more)! Which one should be in the new game suite? Mods and ratings are keeping this game relevant for a long time to come. That's the PC sales ONLY (which is all we're counting here anyway).
http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Official_Add-on...
The high-res patch is an OFFICIAL addon. Can't see why it's wrong to benchmark what EVERYONE would download to check out that bought the game, released feb 2012. Heck benchmark dawnguard or something. It came Aug 2012. I'm pretty sure it's still selling and being played. PCper, techpowerup, anandtech's review of the 7970ghz and now this bit-tech.net site. Skyrim's not worth benching but all 4 links show what to do (up the gfx!) and results come through fine and 3 sites show NV winning (your site of course the one of the four that ignores the game - hmm, sort of shows my bias comment doesn't it?). No cpu limit at 3 other sites who installed the OFFICIAL pack I guess, but you can't be bothered to test a HI-RES pack that surely stresses a gpu harder than without? What are we supposed to believe here?
Looks like you may have a point Cerise.
Thanks for the link BTW:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2013/02/21/nvidia...
You can consider witcher 2 added as a 15th benchmarkable game you left out Ryan. Just wish they'd turn on ubersampling. As mins are ~55 for titan here even at 2560x1600. Clearly with it on this would be a NON cpu limited game too (it isn't cpu limited even off). Please refrain from benchmarking games with less than a 100K units in sales. By definition that means nobody is playing them OR buying them right? And further we can extrapolate that nobody cares about their performance. Can anyone explain why skyrim with hires (and an addon that came after) is excluded but TWO games with basically ZERO sales are in here as important games that will be hanging with us for a few years?
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - link
Yes, appreciate it thanks, and your links I'll be checking out now.They already floated the poster vote article for the new game bench lineup, and what was settled upon already was Never Settle heavily flavored, so don't expect anything but the same or worse here.
That's how it goes and there's a lot of pressure and PC populism and that great 2 week yearly vacation, and certainly attempting to prop a dying amd ship that "enables" this whole branch of competition for review sites is certainly not ignored. A hand up, a hand out, give em hand !
lol
Did you see where Wiz there at TPU in Titan review mentioned nVidia SLI plays 18 of 19 in house game tests and amd CF fails on 6 of them... currently fails on 6 of 19.
" NVIDIA has done a very good job here in the past, and out of the 19 games in our test suite, SLI only fails in F1 2012. Compare that to 6 out of 19 failed titles with AMD CrossFire. "
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_...
So the amd fanboys have a real problem recommending 79xx rather 7xxx or 6xxx doubled or tripled up as an alternative with equal or better cost and "some performance wins" when THIRTY THREE PERCENT OF THE TIME AMD CF FAILS.
I'm sorry, I was supposed to lie about that and claim all of amd's driver issues are behind it and it's all equal and amd used to have problems and blah blah blah the green troll company has driver issues too and blah blah blah...
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - link
Oh man, investigative reporting....lol" http://www.vgchartz.com/game/23202/crysis-warhead/
Global sales .01mil...That's a decimal point right?
http://www.vgchartz.com/game/70754/dirt-showdown/
It hasn't reached enough sales to post the decimal point. Heck xbox360 only sold 140K units globally. Meanwhile:
http://www.vgchartz.com/game/49111/the-elder-scrol...
2.75million sold (that's not a decimal any more)! Which one should be in the new game suite? "
Well it's just a mad, mad, amd world ain't it.
You have a MASSIVE point there.
Excellent link, that's a bookmark.
Zingam - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
GeForce Titan "That means 1/3 FP32 performance, or roughly 1.3TFLOPS"Playstation 4 "High-end PC GPU (also built by AMD), delivering 1.84TFLOPS of performance"
Can somebody explain to me how that above could be? GeForce Titan $999 graphics card has much lesser performance than what would be in basically (if I understand properly) an APU by AMD for $500 for the full system??? I doubt that Sony will accept $1000 or more loss but what I find even more doubtful that an APU could have that much performance.
Please, somebody clarify!
chizow - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
1/3 FP32 is double-precision FP64 throughput for Titanic. The PS4 must be quoting single-precision FP32 throughput and 1.84TFlops is nothing impressive in that regard. I believe GT200/RV670 were producing numbers in that range for single-precision FLOPs.Blazorthon - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
You are correct about PS4 quoting single precision and such, but I'm sure that you're wrong about GT200 being anywhere near 1.8TFLOPS in single precision. That number is right around the Radeon 7850.chizow - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
GT200 was around 1TFlop, I was confused because the same gen cards (RV670) were in the 1.2-1.3TFLOP range due to AMD's somewhat overstated VLIW5 theoretical peak numbers. Cypress for example was ~2.5TFlops so I wasn't too far off the mark in quoted TFLOPs.But yes if PS4 is GCN the performance would be closer to a 7850 in an apples to apples comparison.
frogger4 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Yep, the quoted number for the PS4 is the single precision performance. It's just over the single precision FP for the HD7850 at 1.76flops, and it has one more compute unit, so that makes sense. The double precision for Pitcairn GPUs is 1/16th of that.The single precision performance for the Titan is (more than) three times the 1.3Tflop double precision number. Hope that clears it up!
StealthGhost - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Why are the settings/resolution used for, at least Battlefield 3, not consistent with those used in previous tests on GPUs, most directly those in Bench? Makes it harder to compare.Bench is such a great tool, it should be constantly updated and completely relevant, not discarded like it seems to be with these tests.