The NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X Review
by Ryan Smith on March 17, 2015 3:00 PM ESTBattlefield 4
Kicking off our 2015 benchmark suite is Battlefield 4, DICE’s 2013 multiplayer military shooter. After a rocky start, Battlefield 4 has since become a challenging game in its own right and a showcase title for low-level graphics APIs. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, based on our experiences our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, which means a card needs to be able to average at least 60fps if it’s to be able to hold up in multiplayer.
After stripping away the Frostbite engine’s expensive (and not wholly effective) MSAA, what we’re left with for BF4 at 4K with Ultra quality puts the GTX Titan X in a pretty good light. At 58.3fps it’s not quite up to the 60fps mark, but it comes very close, close enough that the GTX Titan X should be able to stay above 30fps virtually the entire time, and never drop too far below 30fps in even the worst case scenario. Alternatively, dropping to Medium quality should give the GTX Titan X plenty of headroom, with an average framerate of 94.8fps meaning even the lowest framerate never drops below 45fps.
From a benchmarking perspective Battlefield 4 at this point is a well optimized title that’s a pretty good microcosm of overall GPU performance. In this case we find that the GTX Titan X performs around 33% better than the GTX 980, which is almost exactly in-line with our earlier performance predictions. Keeping in mind that while GTX Titan X has 50% more execution units than GTX 980, it’s also clocked at around 88% of the clockspeed, so 33% is right where we should be in a GPU-bound scenario.
Otherwise compared to the GTX 780 Ti and the original GTX Titan, the performance advantage at 4K is around 50% and 66% respectively. GTX Titan X is not going to double the original Titan’s performance – there’s only so much you can do without a die shrink – but it continues to be amazing just how much extra performance NVIDIA has been able to wring out without increasing power consumption and with only a minimal increase in die size.
On the broader competitive landscape, this is far from the Radeon R9 290X/290XU’s best title, with GTX Titan X leading by 50-60%. However this is also a showcase title for when AFR goes right, as the R9 295X2 and GTX 980 SLI both shoot well past the GTX Titan X, demonstrating the performance/consistency tradeoff inherent in multi-GPU setups.
Finally, shifting gears for a moment, gamers looking for the ultimate 1440p card will not be disappointed. GTX Titan X will not get to 120fps here (it won’t even come close), but at 78.7fps it’s well suited for driving 1440p144 displays. In fact it’s the only single-GPU card to do better than 60fps at this resolution.
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modeless - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
This *is* a compute card, but for an application that doesn't need FP64: deep learning. In fact, deep learning would do even better with FP16. What deep learning does need is lots of ALUs (check) and lots of RAM (double check). Deep learning people were asking for more RAM and they got it. I'm considering buying one just for training neural nets.Yojimbo - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
Yes, I got that idea from the keynote address, and I think that's why they have 12GB of RAM. But how much deep-learning-specific compute demand is there? Are there lots of people who use compute just for deep learning and nothing else that demands FP64 performance? Enough that it warrants building an entire GPU (M200) just for them? Surely NVIDIA is counting mostly on gaming sales for Titan and whatever cut-down M200 card arrives later.Yojimbo - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
Oh, and of course also counting on the Quadro sales in the workstation market.DAOWAce - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
Nearly double the performance of a single 780 when heavily OC'd, jesus christ, I wish I had disposable income.I already got burned by buying a 780 though ($722 before it dropped $200 a month later due to the Ti's release), so I'd much rather at this point extend the lifespan of my system by picking up some cheap second hand 780 and dealing with SLI's issues again (haven't used it since my 2x 460's) while I sit and wait for the 980 Ti to get people angry again or even until the next die shrink.
At any rate, I won't get burned again buying my first ever enthusiast card, that's for damn sure.
Will Robinson - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
Well Titan X looks like a really mean machine.A bit pricey but Top Dog has always been like that for NV so you can't ping it too badly on that.I'm really glad NVDA has set their "Big Maxwell" benchmark because now it's up to R390X to defeat it.
This will be flagship V flagship with the winner taking all the honors.
poohbear - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
Couldn't u show us a chart of VRAM usage for Shadows of Mordor instead of minimum frames? Argus Monitor charts VRAM usage, it would've been great to see how much average and maximum VRAM Shadows of Mordor uses (of the available 12gb).Meaker10 - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
They only show paged ram, not actual usage.ChristopherJack - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
I'm surprised how often the ageing 7990 tops this. I had no doubt what so ever that the 295x2 was going to stomp all over this & that's what bothered me about everyone claiming the Titan X was going to be the fastest graphics card, blah, blah, blah. Yes I'm aware those are dual GPU cards in xfire, no I don't care because they're single cards & can be found for significantly lower prices if price/performance is the only concern.Pc_genjin - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
So... as a person who has the absolute worst timing ever when it comes to purchasing technology, I built a brand new PC - FOR THE FIRST TIME IN NINE YEARS - just three days ago with 2 x GTX 980s. I haven't even received them yet, and I run across several reviews for this - today. Now, the question is: do I attempt to return the two 980s, saving $100 in the process? Or is it just better to keep the 980s? (Thankfully I didn't build the system yet, and consequently open them already, or I'd be livid.). Thanks for any advice, and sorry for any arguments I spark, yikes.)D. Lister - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
The 2x980s would be significantly more powerful than a single Titan X, even with 1/3rd the total VRAM.