Battlefield 3

Our final action game of our benchmark suite is Battlefield 3, DICE’s 2011 multiplayer military shooter. Its ability to pose a significant challenge to GPUs has been dulled some by time and drivers, but it’s still a challenge if you want to hit the highest settings at the highest resolutions at the highest anti-aliasing levels. Furthermore while we can crack 60fps in single player mode, our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, so hitting high framerates here may not be high enough.

AMD and NVIDIA have gone back and forth in this game over the past year, and as of late NVIDIA has held a very slight edge with the GTX 680. That means Titan has ample opportunity to push well past the 7970GE, besting AMD’s single-GPU contender by 52% at 2560. Even the GTX 680 is left well behind, with Titan clearing it by 48%.

This is enough to get Titan to 74fps at 2560 with 4xMSAA, which is just fast enough to make BF3 playable at those settings with a single GPU. Otherwise by the time we drop to 1920, even the 120Hz gamers should be relatively satisfied.

Moving on, as always multi-GPU cards end up being faster, but not necessarily immensely so. 22% for the GTX 690 and just 12% for the 7990 are smaller leads than we’ve seen elsewhere.

Far Cry 3 Civilization V
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  • etriky - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link

    OK, after a little digging I guess I shouldn't be to upset about not having Blender benches in this review. Tesla K20 and GeForce GTX TITAN support was only added to Blender on the 2/21 and requires a custom build (it's not in the main release). See http://www.miikahweb.com/en/blender/svn-logs/commi... for more info
  • Ryan Smith - Monday, February 25, 2013 - link

    As noted elsewhere, OpenCL was broken in the Titan launch drivers, greatly limiting what we could run. We have more planned including SLG's LuxMark, which we will publish an update for once the driver situation is resolved.
  • kukreknecmi - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link

    If you look at Azui's PDF, with using different type of kernel , results for 7970 are :

    SGEMM : 2646 GFLOP
    DGEMM : 848 GFLOP

    Why did u take the lowest numbers for 7970 ??
  • codedivine - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link

    This was answered above. See one of my earlier comments.
  • gwolfman - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link

    ASUS: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
    OR
    Titan gfx card category (only one shows up for now): http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Sub...

    Anand and staff, post this in your news feed please! ;)
  • extide - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link

    PLEASE start including Folding@home benchmarks!!!
  • TheJian - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link

    Why? It can't make me any money and isn't a professional app. It tells us nothing. I'd rather see photoshop, premier, some finite analysis app, 3d Studiomax, some audio or content creation app or anything that can be used to actually MAKE money. They should be testing some apps that are actually used by those this is aimed at (gamers who also make money on their PC but don't want to spend $2500-3500 on a full fledged pro card).

    What does any card prove by winning folding@home (same with bitcoin crap, botnets get all that now anyway)? If I cure cancer is someone going to pay me for running up my electric bill? NOPE. Only a fool would spend a grand to donate electricity (cpu/gpu cycles) to someone else's next Billion dollar profit machine (insert pill name here). I don't care if I get cancer, I won't be donating any of my cpu time to crap like this. Benchmarking this proves nothing on a home card. It's like testing to see how fast I can spin my car tires while the wheels are off the ground. There is no point in winning that contest vs some other car.

    "If we better understand protein misfolding we can design drugs and therapies to combat these illnesses."
    Straight from their site...Great I'll make them a billionaire drug and get nothing for my trouble or my bill. FAH has to be the biggest sucker pitch I've ever seen. Drug companies already rip me off every time I buy a bottle of their pills. They get huge tax breaks on my dime too, no need to help them, or for me to find out how fast I can help them...LOL. No point in telling me sythentics either. They prove nothing other than your stuff is operating correctly and drivers set up right. Their perf has no effect on REAL use of products as they are NOT a product, thus not REAL world. Every time I see the word synthetic and benchmark in the same sentence it makes me want to vomit. If they are limited on time (usually reviewers are) I want to see something benchmarked that I can actually USE for real.

    I feel the same way about max fps. Who cares? You can include them, but leaving out MIN is just dumb. I need to know when a game hits 30fps or less, as that means I don't have a good enough card to get the job done and either need to spend more or turn things down if using X or Y card.
  • Ryan Smith - Monday, February 25, 2013 - link

    At noted elsewhere, FAHBench is in our plans. However we cannot do anything further until NVIDIA fixes OpenCL support.
  • vanwazltoff - Friday, February 22, 2013 - link

    the 690, 680 and 7970 have had almost a year to brew and improve with driver updates, i suspect that after a few drivers and an overclock titan will creep up on a 690 and will probably see a price deduction after a few months. dont clock out yet, just think what this could mean for 700 and 800 series cards, its obvious nvidia can deliver
  • TheJian - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link

    It already runs 1150+ everywhere. Most people hit around 1175 max OC stable on titan. Of course this may improve with aftermarket solutions for cooling but it looks like they hit 1175 or so around the world. And that does hit 690 perf and some cases it wins. In compute it's already a winner.

    If there is no die shrink on the next gens from either company I don't expect much. You can only do so much with 250-300w before needing a shrink to really see improvements. I really wish they'd just wait until 20nm or something to give us a real gain. Otherwise will end up with a ivy,haswell deal. Where you don't get much (5-15%). Intel won't wow again until 14nm. Graphics won't wow again until the next shrink either (full shrink, not the halves they're talking now).

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