NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTSynthetics
As always we’ll also take a quick look at synthetic performance to get a better look at Titan’s underpinnings. These tests are mostly for comparing cards from within a manufacturer, as opposed to directly comparing AMD and NVIDIA cards. We’ll start with 3DMark Vantage’s Pixel Fill test.
Pixel fill is a mix of a ROP test and a test to see if you have enough bandwidth to feed those ROPs. At the same time the smallest increase in theoretical performance for Titan over GTX 680 was in ROP performance, where a 50% increase in ROPs was met with a minor clockspeed reduction for a final increase in ROP performance of 25%.
The end result is that with gains of 28%, Titan’s lead over GTX 680 is just a hair more than its increase in theoretical ROP performance. Consequently at first glance it looks like Titan has enough memory and cache bandwidth to feed its 48 ROPs, which given where we’re at today with GDDR5 is good news as GDDR5 has very nearly run out of room.
Moving on, we have our 3DMark Vantage texture fillrate test, which does for texels and texture mapping units what the previous test does for ROPs.
Oddly enough, despite the fact that Titan’s texture performance improvements over GTX 680 were only on the range of 46%, here Titan is measured as having 62% more texturing performance. This may be how Titan is interplaying with its improved bandwidth, or it may be a case where some of the ancillary changes NVIDIA made to the texture paths for compute are somehow also beneficial to proper texturing performance.
Finally we’ll take a quick look at tessellation performance with TessMark.
Unsurprisingly, Titan is well ahead of anything else NVIDIA produces. At 49% faster it’s just a bit over the 46% theoretical performance improvement we would expect from the increased number of Polymorph Engines the extra 6 SMXes bring. Interestingly, as fast as GTX 580’s tessellation performance was, these results would indicate that Titan offers more than a generational jump in tessellation performance, nearly tripling GTX 580’s tessellation performance. Though at this time it’s not at all clear just what such tessellation performance is good for, as we seem to be reaching increasingly ridiculous levels.
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veppers - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Grow up man.CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Adults like myself face reality. Lying fanboys act like spoiled brats and cannot stand to hear or see the truth.You're a child.
Alucard291 - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
Yup and you sound just like the spoilt brat in question. This is not engadget mate. Go away.CeriseCogburn - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
So far you've posted 3 attacks against me, and added exactly NOTHING to any discussion here.It's clear you're the whining troll with nothing to say, so you are one that needs to go away, right ? Right.
chizow - Monday, February 25, 2013 - link
Oh the irony, you are crying about posting personal attacks and adding nothing to any discussion here? That's what every single one of your posts boils down to.Alucard291 - Friday, March 8, 2013 - link
The discussion? You spew random offensive insulting nonsense against anyone who dares to point out that slower + more expensive is worse than faster and cheaper (be it amd or nv).You then proceed to attack people (on a very personal level I might add) for whatever other reason and go on to say that AMD (did anyone except you even mention amd? - well I'm sure some did but mostly due to your constant stream of butthurt) is terrible.
Cool don't use them. Calm down, relax, take a breather go for a walk.
Or of course you can continue whiteknighting some random product that you are unlikely (given the odds) to ever buy for yourself. Who cares. Just get off the neophyte train when you do it. Ok?
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - link
You have no clue on any odds.Like I said, you people are 3rd worlder crybabies.
Between bragging hardcore upper end users frequent Anandtech, you whine and cry about 1/3rd the price of a decent PC.
You're all full of it, and all act like you're budget is personal malaria in sub saharan Africa, except of course when you're rig bragging.
This is the USA, except of course wherever you penniless paupers reside.
RussianSensation - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Yes, yes. Keep eating NV's marketing. 36-38% faster than a $430 HD7970GE for $1000???!!http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/grafikkarten/20...
Heck, you can buy a $500 Asus Matrix Platinum 7970 and those overclock to 1300mhz, which makes the Matrix 30% faster than the GTX680. Do the math and see where that ends up relative to the Titan.
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canu...
This is really a $699 card max.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Why buy a crashing piece of crap amd cannot even write drivers for ?Forget it.
AMD is almost gone too, so "future proof" is nowhere except in nVidia's pocket.
Now and in the future, nVidia wins period.
Idiots buy amd.
Hrel - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
The problem with that reasoning, that they're raising here, is that the 7970 is almost as fast and costs a lot less. The Titan is competing, based on performance, with the 7970. Based on that comparison it's a shitty deal.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
$430. So based on that I'd say the highest price you can justify for this card is $560. We'll round up to $600.
Nvidia shipping this, at this price, and just saying "it's a luxury product" is bullshit. It's not a luxury product, it's their version of a 7970GHE. But they want to try and get a ridiculous profit to support their PhysX and CUDA projects.
Nvidia just lost me as a customer. This is the last straw. This card should be pushing the pricing down on the rest of their lineup. They SHOULD be introducing it to compete with the 7970GHE. Even at my price range, compare the GTX660 to the 7870GHE, or better yet the sub $200 7850. They just aren't competitive anymore. I'll admit, I was a bit of a Nvidia fan boy. Loved their products. Was disappointed by older ATI cards and issues I had with them. (stability, screen fitting properly, audio issues) But ATI has become AMD and they've improved quality a lot and Nvidia is USING their customers loyalty; that's just wrong.
I'm done with Nvidia on the desktop. By the time I need a new laptop AMD will probably have the graphics switching all sorted; so I'm probably done with Nvidia on laptops too.