The NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X Review
by Ryan Smith on March 17, 2015 3:00 PM ESTOur 2015 GPU Benchmark Suite
Also kicking off alongside GTX Titan X today will be the first article to use our new 2015 GPU benchmark suite.
For 2015 we have upgraded or replaced most of our games, retiring several long-time titles including Bioshock: Infinite, Metro, and our last DirectX 10 game, Crysis Warhead. Our returning titles are Battlefield 4 and Crysis 3, the former of which is still a popular MP title to this day, and the latter continuing to pulverize GPUs well before we hit its highest settings.
Joining these 2 games are 7 new titles. Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Far Cry 4 are our new action/shooter games, while Dragon Age: Inquisition rides the line between an action game and an RPG. Meanwhile for strategy games we have Civilization: Beyond Earth and Total War: Attila, these two games representing the latest entries in their respective series. Rounding out our collection is GRID Autosport, the latest GRID game from Codemasters, and the unique first person puzzle/exploration game The Talos Principle from Croteam.
| AnandTech GPU Bench 2015 Game List | ||||
| Game | Genre | API(s) | ||
| Battlefield 4 | FPS | DX11 + Mantle | ||
| Crysis 3 | FPS | DX11 | ||
| Shadow of Mordor | Action/Open World | DX11 | ||
| Civilization: Beyond Earth | Strategy | DX11 + Mantle | ||
| Dragon Age: Inquisition | RPG | DX11 + Mantle | ||
| The Talos Principle | First Person Puzzle | DX11 | ||
| Far Cry 4 | FPS | DX11 | ||
| Total War: Attila | Strategy | DX11 | ||
| GRID Autosport | Racing | DX11 | ||
With new low-level APIs ramping up in 2015, we’re going to be paying particular attention to APIs starting this year, as everyone is interested in seeing what Vulkan (née Mantle) and DirectX 12 can do. Unless otherwise noted, going forward all benchmarks will be using low-level APIs when available, meaning DX12/Vulkan/Mantle when possible.
Meanwhile from a design standpoint our benchmark settings remain unchanged. For lower-end cards we’ll look at 1080p at various quality settings when practical, and for high-end cards we’ll be looking at 1080p and above at the highest quality settings. The one exception to this is 4K, which at 2.25x the resolution of 1440p remains difficult to hit playable framerates, in which case we’ll also include a lower quality setting to showcase what kind of quality hit it takes to make 4K playable on current video cards.
The Test
As for our hardware testbed, it remains unchanged from 2014, being composed of an overclocked Core i7-4960X hosed in an NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition case.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: | AMD Radeon R9 295X2 AMD Radeon R9 290X AMD Radeon HD 7990 NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 347.84 Beta AMD Catalyst Cat 15.3 Beta |
| OS: | Windows 8.1 Pro |
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Antronman - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
The Titan has always been marketed as a hybrid between a gaming and graphics development card.H3ld3r - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
Agree 100%H3ld3r - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
http://tpucdn.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_Titan...Evarin - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
For people thinking that VRAM is unneeded, you must not be heavy into modding. Especially with Fallout 4 and GTA 5 on the horizon, massive amounts of room for texture mods will come in handy.Black Obsidian - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
6-8GB would seem to meet that requirement nicely.As is often the case with "doubled RAM" models, by the time that 12GB of VRAM is useful, we'll be a couple of generations down the road, and cards with 12GB of VRAM will be much faster, much cheaper, or both.
Maybe at that point a Titan X owner could pick up a cheap used card and run them in SLI, but even then they're laying out more money than a user who buys a $500 card every couple of years and has the VRAM he/she needs when it's actually useful.
H3ld3r - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
I agree with you but don't forget how vram is used in sli and cf. Vram of gpu 1 mirrors vram of 0 so if have 2x 4gb you're only taking advantage of 4gb. Anyway i prefer fast ram than hughe amounts of it.Evarin - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
We've already had a game which called for 6GB VRAM for an advanced texture pack. Imagine an Elder Scrolls or a Fallout where every single object in the game has a 4k resolution texture. I think it'd be a challenge even for the titan.Antronman - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
The way that RAM works is the worse your system is, the more RAM you end up needing.There are plateaus, but as GPUs get faster you need less VRAM to store the same amount of information.
The Titan X is much faster than the Titan BE, and thus needs less VRAM, assuming that the application is the same.
Then we get into Direct X 12 and Vulkan. They're supposed to increase efficiency all-around, reducing the demand for resources like RAM and cores even more.
Death666Angel - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
"the card is generally overpowered for the relatively low maximum resolutions of DL-DVI "So I can drive my 1440p 105Hz display with it and get above 105fps? No? So what kind of statement is that then. DL-DVI may be old, but to say that 1440p is a low maximum resolution, especially with 100Hz+ IPS displays which rely on DL-DVI input, is strange to say the least.
H3ld3r - Thursday, March 19, 2015 - link
Based in what i saw in ryan's review 4k games aren't that much memory demanding. If so how can anyone explain R9 performance?