NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan Review, Part 2: Titan's Performance Unveiled
by Ryan Smith & Rahul Garg on February 21, 2013 9:00 AM ESTCrysis: Warhead
Up next is our legacy title for 2013, Crysis: Warhead. The stand-alone expansion to 2007’s Crysis, at over 4 years old Crysis: Warhead can still beat most systems down. Crysis was intended to be future-looking as far as performance and visual quality goes, and it has clearly achieved that. We’ve only finally reached the point where single-GPU cards have come out that can hit 60fps at 1920 with 4xAA.
At 2560 we still have a bit of a distance to go before any single-GPU card can crack 60fps. In lieu of that Titan is the winner as expected. Leading the GTX 680 by 54%, this is Titan’s single biggest win over its predecessor, actually exceeding the theoretical performance advantage based on the increase in functional units alone. For some reason GTX 680 never did gain much in the way of performance here versus the GTX 580, and while it’s hard to argue that Titan has reversed that, it has at least corrected some of the problem in order to push more than 50% out.
In the meantime, with GTX 680’s languid performance, this has been a game the latest Radeon cards have regularly cleared. For whatever reason they’re a good match for Crysis, meaning even with all its brawn, Titan can only clear the 7970GE by 21%.
On the other hand, our multi-GPU cards are a mixed bag. Once more Titan loses to both, but the GTX 690 only leads by 15% thanks to GK104’s aforementioned weak Crysis performance. Meanwhile the 7990 takes a larger lead at 33%.
I’d also note that we’ve thrown in a “bonus round” here just to see when Crysis will be playable at 1080p with its highest settings and with 4x SSAA for that picture-perfect experience. As it stands AMD multi-GPU cards can already cross 60fps, but for everything else we’re probably a generation off yet before Crysis is completely and utterly conquered.
Moving on, we once again have minimum framerates for Crysis.
When it comes to Titan, the relative improvement in minimum framerates over GTX 680 is nothing short of obscene. Whatever it was that was holding back GTX 680 is clearly having a hard time slowing down Titan, leading to Titan offering 71% better minimum framerates. There’s clearly much more going on here than just an increase in function units.
Meanwhile, though Titan’s gains here over the 7970GE aren’t quite as high as they were with the GTX 680, the lead over the 7970GE still grows a bit to 26%. As for our mutli-GPU cards, this appears to be a case where SLI is struggling; the GTX 690 is barely faster than Titan here. Though at 31% faster than Titan, the 7990 doesn’t seem to be faltering much.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
337 Comments
View All Comments
varg14 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
I will hang on to my SLI 560 tis for a while longer. Since i game at 1080p they perform very well.mayankleoboy1 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Some video conversion benchmarks please.mayankleoboy1 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Ohh, and the effect of PCIE2.0 VS PCIE3.0 also. Lets see how much is the Titan gimped by PCIE2.0Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
This isn't something we can do at this second, but it's definitely something we can follow up on once things slow down a bit.mayankleoboy1 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Sure. I am looking forward to a part three of the Titan reviewHrel - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
The problem with that reasoning, that they're raising here, is that the 7970 is almost as fast and costs a lot less. The Titan is competing, based on performance, with the 7970. Based on that comparison it's a shitty deal.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
$430. So based on that I'd say the highest price you can justify for this card is $560. We'll round up to $600.
Nvidia shipping this, at this price, and just saying "it's a luxury product" is bullshit. It's not a luxury product, it's their version of a 7970GHE. But they want to try and get a ridiculous profit to support their PhysX and CUDA projects.
Nvidia just lost me as a customer. This is the last straw. This card should be pushing the pricing down on the rest of their lineup. They SHOULD be introducing it to compete with the 7970GHE. Even at my price range, compare the GTX660 to the 7870GHE, or better yet the sub $200 7850. They just aren't competitive anymore. I'll admit, I was a bit of a Nvidia fan boy. Loved their products. Was disappointed by older ATI cards and issues I had with them. (stability, screen fitting properly, audio issues) But ATI has become AMD and they've improved quality a lot and Nvidia is USING their customers loyalty; that's just wrong.
I'm done with Nvidia on the desktop. By the time I need a new laptop AMD will probably have the graphics switching all sorted; so I'm probably done with Nvidia on laptops too.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link
LOL - be done, and buy the alternative crap - amd.You'll be sorry, and when you have to hold back admitting it, I'll be laughing the whole time.
Poor baby can't pony up the grand, so he's boycotting the whole line.
You know you people are the sickest freaks the world has ever seen, and frankly I don't believe you, and consider you insane.
You're all little crybaby socialist activists. ROFL You're all pathetic.
nVidia won't listen to you, so go blow on your amd crash monkey, you and two other people will do it before amd disappears into bankruptcy, and then we can laugh at your driver less video cards.
I never seen bigger crybaby two year olders in my entire life. You all live in your crybaby world together, in solidarity - ROFL
No one cares if you lying turds claim you aren't buying nVidia - they have billions and are DESTROYING amd because you cheapskate losers cost amd money - LOL
YOU ARE A BURDEN AND CANNOT PAY FOR THE PRODUCTION OF A VIDEO CARD !
Enjoy your false amd ghetto loser lifestyle.
Soulnibbler - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Hey, I'm excited about the fp64 performance but I'm not going to have any time to write code for a bit so I'll ask the question that would let me justify buying a card like this:How much acceleration should I expect using this card with Capture One as compared to AMD/software rendering. I've heard anecdotal evidence that the openCL code paths in version 7 make everything much faster, but I'd like a metric before I give up my current setup (windows in VMware) and dual-boot to get openCL support.
I know openCL is not yet ready on this card but when you revisit it could we see a little Capture One action?
Preferably the benchmark sets would be high resolution images at both high and low iso.
Ryan Smith - Monday, February 25, 2013 - link
I'm afraid I don't know anything about Capture One. Though if you could describe it, that would be helpful.Soulnibbler - Monday, February 25, 2013 - link
Capture One is a raw developer for digital cameras.http://www.phaseone.com/en/Imaging-Software.aspx
notably for medium format digital backs but also for 35mm and aps sensors. It could be considered a competitor to Adobe's Lightroom and ACR software but the medium format camera support and workflow are the major differentiators.
The last two releases have had openCL support for both previews and exporting which I've heard has lead to reductions in time to get an image through post.
I'd imagine that one could benchmark on a large library of photos and determine if this card as a compute card is any improvement over standard gaming cards in this use scenario.
I'd imagine this is part of the market that NVIDIA is aiming at as I know at least one user who switched to an ATI W7000 for openCL support with Capture One.