The NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X Review
by Ryan Smith on March 17, 2015 3:00 PM ESTCivilization: Beyond Earth
Shifting gears from action to strategy, we have Civilization: Beyond Earth, the latest in the Civilization series of strategy games. Civilization is not quite as GPU-demanding as some of our action games, but at Ultra quality it can still pose a challenge for even high-end video cards. Meanwhile as the first Mantle-enabled strategy title Civilization gives us an interesting look into low-level API performance on larger scale games, along with a look at developer Firaxis’s interesting use of split frame rendering with Mantle to reduce latency rather than improving framerates.
Though not as intricate as Crysis 3 or Shadow of Mordor, Civilization still requires a very powerful GPU to run it at 4K if you want to hit 60fps. In fact of our single-GPU configurations the GTX Titan X is the only card to crack 60fps, delivering 69fps at the game’s most extreme setting. This is once again well ahead of the GTX 980 – beating it by 31% at 4K – and 40%+ ahead of the GK110 cards. On the other hand this is the closest AMD’s R9 290XU will get, with the GTX Titan X only beating it by 23% at 4K.
Meanwhile at 1440p it’s entirely possible to play Civilization at 120fps, making it one of a few games where the GTX Titan X can keep up with high refresh rate 1440p monitors.
When it comes to minimum framerates the GTX Titan X doesn’t dominate quite like it does at average framerates, but it still handily takes the top spot. Even at its worst, the GTX Titan X can still deliver 44fps at 4K under Civilization.
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cmoney408 - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
can you please post the settings you used for the 295x2? not the in game settings, but what you used in catalyst.FlushedBubblyJock - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link
" and the Radeon R9 295X2, the latter of which is down to ~$699 these days and "I knew it wouldn't be $699 when i clicked the link...
its frikkin $838 , $ 1,176 $990, $978 ...
Yep, that's the real amd card price, not the fantasy one.
gianluca - Sunday, April 5, 2015 - link
Hi!Just a question: Do you suggest me to buy r9 295x2?
Thx
Kyururin - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
Umm I find it pointless to compare AMD R9 290x with GTX 980, R9 290x is build to be competitive to Nvidia's stock 780 not 780ti and sure as hell not GTX 980, it's dumb, it's like trying to ask a grandma(R9 290x) to compete with supermodel(GTX 980) in a beauty pageant, of course Nvidia is going to win, but it's not like the winning gap is spectacular or something to be astonished about. Last but not least GTX 980's lead over the grandma is the largest sub 2k, let's not forget that both the GTX 980 and the grandma are build to handle 4k so given the time Nvidia has to prepare the GTX980, it should had obliterated the grandma in 4k but the performance gap is not that fricking big and deserved to be woved, especially FarCry 4. Fanboys always bash AMD for their terrible drivers but it's not like they are ignored you dumb witt, they are slowly improving their drivers. Did AMD ever said We are going to pretend that our driver don't suck and so we are not going to fix it.alexreffand - Monday, May 18, 2015 - link
Why is the GTX 580 in the tests? Why not the Titan Z or even the 970?ajboysen - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link
I'm not sure if the specs have changed since this post but they list the boost clock speed as 1531 MHz, Not 1002