NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTMeet The 2013 GPU Benchmark Suite & The Test
Having taken a look at the compute side of Titan, let’s finally dive into what most of you have probably been waiting for: our gaming benchmarks.
As this is the first major launch of 2013 it’s also the first time we’ll be using our new 2013 GPU benchmark suite. This benchmark suite should be considered a work in progress at the moment, as it’s essentially incomplete. With several high-profile games due in the next 4 weeks (and no other product launches expected), we expect we’ll be expanding our suite to integrate those latest games. In the meantime we have composed a slightly smaller suite of 8 games that will serve as our base.
| AnandTech GPU Bench 2013 Game List | |||
| Game | Genre | ||
| DiRT: Showdown | Racing | ||
| Total War: Shogun 2 | Strategy | ||
| Hitman: Absolution | Action | ||
| Sleeping Dogs | Action/Open World | ||
| Crysis: Warhead | FPS | ||
| Far Cry 3 | FPS | ||
| Battlefield 3 | FPS | ||
| Civilization V | Strategy | ||
Returning to the suite will be Total War: Shogun 2, Civilization V, Battlefield 3, and of course Crysis: Warhead. With no performance-demanding AAA strategy games released in the last year, we’re effectively in a holding pattern for new strategy benchmarks, hence we’re bringing Shogun and Civilization forward. Even 2 years after its release, Shogun 2 can still put an incredible load on a system on its highest settings, and Civilization V is still one of the more advanced games in our suite due to its use of driver command lists for rendering. With Company of Heroes 2 due here in the near future we may finally get a new strategy game worth benchmarking, while Total War will be returning with Rome 2 towards the end of this year.
Meanwhile Battlefield 3 is still among the most popular multiplayer FPSes, and though newer video cards have lightened its system-killer status, it still takes a lot of horsepower to play. Furthermore the engine behind it, Frostbite 2, is used in a few other action games, and will be used for Battlefield 4 at the end of this year. Finally we have the venerable Crysis: Warhead, our legacy entry. As the only DX10 title in the current lineup it’s good for tracking performance against our oldest video cards, plus it’s still such a demanding game that only the latest video cards can play it at high framerates and resolutions with MSAA.
As for the new games in our suite, we have added DiRT: Showdown, Hitman: Absolution, Sleeping Dogs, and Far Cry 3. DiRT: Showdown is the annual refresh of the DiRT racing franchise from Codemasters, based upon their continually evolving racer engine. Meanwhile Hitman: Absolution is last year’s highly regarded third person action game, and notably in this day and age features a built-in benchmark, albeit a bit of a CPU-intensive one. As for Sleeping Dogs, it’s a rare treat in that it’s a benchmarkable open world game (open world games having benchmarks is practically unheard of) giving us a rare chance to benchmark something from this genre. And finally we have Far Cry 3, the latest rendition of the Far Cry franchise. A popular game in its own right, its jungle environment can be particularly punishing.
These games will be joined throughout the year by additional games as we find games that meet our needs and standards, and for which we can create meaningful benchmarks and validate their performance. As with 2012 we’re looking at having roughly 10 game benchmarks at any given time.
Meanwhile from a settings and resolution standpoint we have finally (and I might add, begrudgingly) moved from 16:10 resolutions to 16:9 resolutions in most cases to better match the popularity of 1080p monitors and the recent wave of 1440p IPS monitors. Our primary resolutions are now 2560x1440, 1920x1080, and 1600x900, with an emphasis on 1920x1080 at lower setting ahead of dropping to lower resolutions, given the increasing marginalization of monitors with sub-1080p resolutions. The one exception to these resolutions is our triple-monitor resolution, which stays at 5760x1200. This is purely for technical reasons, as NVIDIA’s drivers do not consistently offer us 5760x1080 on the 1920x1200 panels we use for testing.
As for the testbed itself, we’ve changed very little. Our testbed remains our trusty 4.3GHz SNB-E, backed with 16GB of RAM and running off of a 256GB Samsung 470 SSD. The one change we have made here is that having validated our platform as being able to handle PCIe 3.0 just fine, we are forcibly enabling PCIe 3.0 on NVIDIA cards where it’s typically disabled. NVIDIA disables PCIe 3.0 by default on SNB-E systems due to inconsistencies in the platform, but as our goal is to remove every non-GPU bottleneck, we have little reason to leave PCIe 3.0 disabled. Especially since most buyers will be on Ivy Bridge platforms where PCIe 3.0 is fully supported.
Finally, we’ve also used this opportunity to refresh a couple of our cards in our test suite. AMD’s original press sample for the 7970 GHz Edition was a reference 7970 with the 7970GE BIOS, a configuration that was more-or-less suitable for the 7970GE, but not one AMD’s partners followed. Since all of AMD’s partners are using open air cooling, we’ve replaced our AMD sample with HIS’s 7970 IceQ X2 GHz Edition, a fairly typical representation of the type of dual-fan coolers that are common on 7970GE cards. Our 7970GE temp/noise results should now be much closer to what retail cards will do, though performance is unchanged.
Unfortunately we’ve had to deviate from that almost immediately for CrossFire testing. Our second HIS card was defective, so due to time constraints we’re using our original AMD 7970GE as our second card for CF testing. This has no impact on performance, but it means that we cannot fairly measure temp or noise. We will update Bench with those results once we get a replacement card and run the necessary tests.
Finally, we also have a Powercolor Devil13 7990 as our 7990 sample. The Devil13 was a limited run part and has been replaced by the plain 7990, the difference between them being a 25MHz advantage for the Devil13. As such we’ve downclocked our Devil13 to match the basic 7990’s specs. The performance and power results should perfectly match a proper retail 7990.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.3GHz |
| Motherboard: | EVGA X79 SLI |
| Power Supply: | Antec True Power Quattro 1200 |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung 470 (256GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1867 4 x 4GB (8-10-9-26) |
| Case: | Thermaltake Spedo Advance |
| Monitor: | Samsung 305T |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 7970 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 314.07 NVIDIA ForceWare 314.09 (Titan) AMD Catalyst 13.2 Beta 6 |
| OS: | Windows 8 Pro |
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justaviking - Wednesday, February 27, 2013 - link
On Feb 22, the review closed wtih this teaser:"Wrapping things up, on Monday we’ll be taking a look at the final piece of the puzzle"
Monday was two days ago. Am I impatient? Yes. I am really looking forward to seeing what you have to say about Origin’s tri-SLI full tower Genesis PC.
Did I miss it somehow?
avel - Wednesday, February 27, 2013 - link
I've been thinking the same thing. While I was waiting I found that Tomshardware has a tri sli titan review up. Maybe Anand will have theirs up today.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, February 27, 2013 - link
Unfortunately it's going to be a few more days. I'm currently out of commission with the flu, so I haven't been able to finish my work on the Genesis system yet.justaviking - Friday, March 1, 2013 - link
Oh, sorry to hear about that.Get well soon.
CiccioB - Monday, March 4, 2013 - link
It would be nice if you could also address TheJian's post.In particular on the reasons for choosing such games instead of those listed and, most of all, if in the future the list of games used will change with at least a part of those more modern ones.
If you made a choice there must be a reason. It would be nice to let us know which it is. Avoiding giving reasons for your choices is a reason for many to have doubts on impartiality and/or professionalism.
Thanks in advance
CeriseCogburn - Monday, March 4, 2013 - link
Dream on, you play as many games as the person you have a problem with.The site is amd gpu biased out the wazoo, and every blind pig knows it. They failed to get a card from nVidia years ago (a certain G92) and it's been open hatred ever since. Same thing happened to Tom's.
I'm sure there are other reasons - I've seen some stated - "the confident and arrogant nVidia reps" was one theme.
The intense "hatred" right now for anyone profitable, especially above and beyond the pined for "take down the giants (Intel and nVidia)" AMD underdog dream of these fantasy activists.
The desire for the "competitive war" to continue so this site has a reason to exist and do video card reviews, thus the failing piece of crap company AMD must be propped continuously, it is after all fully compliant with "self interest" even if it is, and it is, extremely unethical and completely immoral.
So don't expect any answers, and there's exactly ZERO chance fair and equitable is the answer.
CeriseCogburn - Monday, March 4, 2013 - link
Don't get me wrong, the site is great, I've been reading it forever, before it was even on the map, and of course people are human and have certain pressures and personal tastes.That won't ever change.
They have many sections, the podcasts are a recent cool addition for some added flavor, and like anything, especially evaluating tow competing entities, perfection is impossible.
CiccioB - Monday, March 4, 2013 - link
I like this site for GPU reviews. I have always found its review better than those done by many other sites.They are rich in technical description and give many answers many other sites don't even imagine to question.
Or ask and answer only by doing a copy & paste from here, and sometimes even without understanding much of what they are C&P.
The computational tests done here, even in the past years, have not been found anywhere. Others use stupid synthetic benchmark mostly based on OpenCL that require two minutes hack to double their performances or are biased depending on who has sponsored the tests (see AMD and SiSandra Benchmark Suite).
However I have been thinking that the game choice was always "random".
Review after review some good games suddenly disappeared to leave space to others that have not real meaning (i.e. games that do 150+ FPS on high end systems are quite ridiculous to bench). Same for very old games recently superseded by new release. And some games never reviewed at all.
For example, I would like to know games like StarCraft 2, that had big problems with SLI/Crossfire at the time it was published, run now on the latest GPUs with latest drivers. Or games like Arma2 that were unplayable. But I still see Crysis Warhead benches, which is not exacly interesting nor indicative of anything while others already have Crysis 3 benches.
It would also be a good option to add Physx option when possible. For example, with such a beast like Titan many games have enough room to run Physx at high levels. How does that compare with a SLI solution? Or with no Physx at all? How that impact on these GPUs rather than GK104 or older Fermi?
But apart these requests, it would really be nice to understand the choice of reviewed games. Because it is well known that games are good or bad on certain architectures more than others, and choosing only most of those that adapt to one or to another with no apparent reason really makes these test quite cheap with respect to others, like for example those done by Techpowerup like it has been addressed before.
Not answering rally means feeding the doubts. Which for many may change in not being doubts anymore.
Sorry for my English, it is not my native language
clickonflick - Thursday, March 7, 2013 - link
i agree that the price of this GPU is really high , one could easily assemble a fully mainstream laptop online with dell at this price tag or a desktop, but for gamers, to whom performance is above price. then it is a boon for themfor more pics check this out
http://clickonflick/nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan/
so check the above link for specifications of titan
enigz - Thursday, March 7, 2013 - link
CeriseCogBurn, you shit from your mouth, don't you? I've owned both nvidia and amd cards, I go for performance and I most certainly do not care about spending. It is not about the company. I don't go around slamming the other team online like the bloody ball-less keyboard warrior you are. Do you not realise that that your comments make you look like those "fanboys" which you go around insulting? Go grab a paper towel to clean off all that shit dripping down your chin, then sit down and try to absorb what I've just said while I'll be off to get my Titan. At least AMD and NVIDIA are capable of producing graphics and computing solutions for consumers worldwide while you, Sir, are just capable of being an asshole right here at Anandtech.