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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FlushedBubblyJock - Saturday, March 21, 2015 - link
Wow, it's stomping all over 2 of AMDs best gpu's combined.It's a freaking monster.
cykodrone - Saturday, March 21, 2015 - link
I actually went to the trouble to make an account to say sometimes I come here just to read the comments, some of the convos have me rolling on the floor busting my guts laughing, seriously, this is free entertainment at its best! Aside from that, the cost of this Nvidia e-penis would feed 10 starving children for a month. I mean seriously, at what point is it overkill? By that I mean is there any game out there that would absolutely not run good enough on a slightly lesser card at half the price? When I read this card alone requires 250W, my eyes popped out of my head, holy electric bill batman, but I guess if somebody has a 1G to throw away on an e-penis, they don't have electric bill worries. One more question, what kind of CPU/motherboard would you need to back this sucker up? I think this card would be retarded without at least the latest i7 Extreme(ly overpriced), can you imagine some tool dropping this in an i3? What I'm saying is, this sucker would need an expensive 'bed' too, otherwise, you'd just be wasting your time and money.sna1970 - Saturday, March 21, 2015 - link
What dual GTX 980 Anand ?for 2 x $300 Gtx 970 you will get the same or better performance than Titan X for $600 ONLY.
almost same power as well.
$1000 for this card is too much , Just tooooo much.
rolfaalto - Saturday, March 21, 2015 - link
So much silly complaining about value. This is an incredible bargain for compute compared to Tesla -- absolutely crushes at single precision for a fraction of the price! For my application the new Titan X is the absolute best that money can buy, and it's comparatively cheap. So, I'll buy 10 of them, and 100 more if they work out.rolfaalto - Saturday, March 21, 2015 - link
... and the 12GB is the deal maker, 6 GB on the previous Titans was way too little.yiling cao - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
for people using cuda, there is just no AMD option, Upgrading every nvidia new releases.Antronman - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
Or, if you're the kind of person who actually needs CUDA and isn't just using it because they made a mistake in choosing their software and just chose something with a bloated price tag and fancy webpage then you get a Quadro card instead of wasting your money on a Titan.You know. The sort of people who need Solidworks because they're working for a multimillion or even multibillion dollar corporation that wants 3D models or is using GPU computing, or if you're using Maya to animate a movie for a multimillion dollar studio.
Even if you're an indie on a budget, you don't buy a Titan. Because you won't be using software with CUDA or special Nvidia optimization. Because you won't be using iRay.
With the exception of industry applications (excluding individual/small businesses), Nvidia is currently just a choice for brand loyalists or people who want a big epeen.
r13j13r13 - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
titan x vs R9 295x2MyNuts - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
Ill take 2 pleaseXsjado Koncept - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
Your "in-house project developed by our very own Dr. Ian Cutress" is garbage and is obviously not dividing workloads between multi-GPUs, a very simple task for any programmer with access to Google.It's plain as day to see, but gives NV the lead in another benchmark - was this the goal of such awful programming?