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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CeriseCogburn - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
LMHO - yes by the time the amd fanboy actually declares his amd fanboyism, amd won't be around anymore....Yes, you're done.
Alucard291 - Friday, March 8, 2013 - link
And naturally you're not a fanboy... Dear god... you cannot be that stupid...MrSpadge - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Don't buy it, period.CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Another amd fanboy control freak loser.I won't be taking your "advice".
Alucard291 - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Yup you really DO need to grow up a little. Or a lot. Your choice.CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Nope, you crybabies and poorboy whiners are the sad little tropes that need adulthood desperately.Adults earn money and have a grand to spend.
Crybaby children do not.
Alucard291 - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link
Looking at the way you're expressing your impotent rage all over this review's comment section you sound roughly old enough to be my son's class mate :)DemBones79 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Wow... did no one read the first part of this article? I think it's pretty obvious from the price/performance ratio that NVIDIA is trying to scare away all but the most truly insane enthusiasts and the compute-on-a-budget crowd.My guess is that yields are still abysmally low and they're still reeling from the backlog of Tesla orders that resulted from the Titan supercomputer contract win. Given that, they probably do not have sufficient supply yet to meet "enthusiast" demand, so they priced it more into the "you've got to be insane to pay this much for this little" bracket.
Whereas computer scientists and others who could benefit from the compute tech on the card could probably more readily convince their Finance depts. to loosen the purse strings for this as opposed to a Tesla proper.
Don't be fooled. This may be labeled as a "consumer" card, and it certainly is a performance bump over the 680, but it was not brought into this world for the express purpose of playing games.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
You people are all lying freaks.A day before this, many of you screamed buy 2x of the top end, and when amd was charging $599 for one, you were all good with that.
Now like stupid crybaby two year olds, you've all copped the same whine.
You're all pathetic. All liars, too. All sheep that cannot be consistent at all.
Alucard291 - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
Stop being so rude and abusive.Take a break. Stand up go outside, take some deep breaths. Stay away from the internet for a bit.
Might do you some good.