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| Introduction and Specifications | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| A couple of days ago, we showed you the new NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan in all its glory—almost. While we were able to reveal the card itself, discuss its new features and specifications, and talk about some of the new systems it will be powering, we weren’t able to post any performance data. Fortunately, that all changes today. We’ve been able to test NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan in a number of different configurations, including SLI and in a multi-monitor setup, and have the goods for you here today. And yes, we’ve got some Crysis 3 action on tap as well. If you haven’t already done so, we suggest checking out our initial preview of the GeForce GTX Titan. In our original piece, we outline the card’s specifications and cover its new features, like GPU Boost 2.0 and display overclocking, so we won’t be covering them again here. We do have lots of performance data though, including some GPGPU tests, and some overclocked scores too.
The GeForce GTX Titan’s specifications portend to the card’s immense horsepower. Not only is the GK110 at the heart of the GTX Titan twice the size of the GK104 used in the GeForce GTX 600 series, but it offers some new features as well, and it’s paired to a gigantic 6GB frame buffer. Yes, the GeForce GTX Titan’s TDP is lower than NVIDIA’s current flagship GeForce GTX 690 and the Titan is quieter too.
According to NVIDIA, “GeForce GTX TITAN was built to power the world’s fastest gaming PCs. From massively powerful 3-way SLI gaming supercomputers to super-fast and elegant small form factor rigs.” And that’s a big part of the Titan’s story. As you’ll see in the pages ahead, the card is extremely fast. But it doesn’t supplant the GeForce GTX 690. What it does do, however, is allow NVIDIA and its system partners—like Maingear—to offer new ultra powerful gaming PCs and quiet, small form factor rigs with much higher performance than they could before. |
| Test System and Unigine Heaven v4.0 | ||||||||||||
How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the graphics cards in this article on an Asus P9X79 Deluxe motherboard powered by a Core i7-3960X six-core processor and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR3-1866 RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the system UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" default settings and disable any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The memory's X.M.P. profile was enabled to ensure better-than-stock performance and the hard drive was then formatted and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the installation was complete, we fully updated the OS and installed the latest DirectX redist along with all of the drivers, games, and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.
The GeForce GTX Titan crushes the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition and GeForce GTX 680 in this latest version of Unigine's Heaven benchmark, outpacing both cards by about 57%. The dual-GPU powered GeForce GTX 690, however, pull ahead of the Titan by a decent margin. |
| 3DMark Fire Strike Test | ||||||
Futuremark's latest edition of 3DMark shows the new GeForce GTX Titan dominating the single-GPU powered Radeon HD 7970 GHz and GeForce GTX 680. The dual-GPU powered GeForce GTX 690 pulls ahead of Titan, however, mostly due to a large advantage in performance in 3DMark's Game Test 1. |
| Alien vs. Predator Performance | ||||||
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| Metro 2033 Performance | ||||||
The GeForce GTX Titan annihilated the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition and the GTX 680 once again in the Metro 2033 benchmark, regardless of the resolution. The GeForce GTX 690 was still the fastest overall, but the delta separating Titan from the GTX 690 were relatively small. |
| Batman: Arkham City Performance | ||||||
Batman: Arkham City proved to be somewhat of a strong suit for the new GeForce GTX Titan. In this game, NVIDIA's latest flagship single-GPU powered card spanked the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition and the GeForce GTX 680 and trails the dual-GPU powered GeForce GTX 690 by only a few percentage points. |
| Sleeping Dogs Performance | ||||||
Sleeping Dogs tends to favor AMD's GCN architecture, but that didn't help the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition much. The deltas separating the Radeon and Titan aren't huge in this game, but the GeForce GTX Titan scores another victory over the single-GPU powered cards nonetheless. |
| Hitman: Absolution Performance | ||||||
Due to its support for Global Illumination (which we enable during testing), Hitman: Absolution tends to favor AMD's GCN architecture as well. Regardless, the new GeForce GTX Titan clearly outpaced the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition and GeForce GTX 680 here, and came close to catching the GTX 690 at 1920x1200 as well. |
| Crysis 3 Performance | ||||||
The dual-GPU powered GeForce GTX 690 remains the fastest card overall in Crysis 3, outpacing the new GeForce GTX Titan at both resolutions. Titan, however, clearly outpaces the other single-GPU powered cards which couldn't put up playable frame rates in this game, with the very high image quality settings that we used for testing. Back the image quality down a bit, however, and of course the game is playable for all cards. |
| SLI Performance | ||||
After testing the new GeForce GTX Titan in a single-GPU configuration, we moved on to testing two and 3-way SLI multi-GPU modes. For reference purposes, we've left the dual-GPU powered GeForce GTX 690 in the graphs (this is NOT quad-SLI) and doubled-up on the GeForce GTX 680 and Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition cards as well.
The Hitman: Absolution benchmark didn't want to scale past two GPUs with the GeForce GTX Titan, but it didn't really matter. Two of these cards outpace everything else in this game once you hit higher resolutions. And performance is only going to get better once the game scales properly.
The GeForce GTX Titans ruled the roost in the Batman: Arkham City benchmark. The two GeForce GTX Titan card setup outpaced everything else by a wide margin and things only got better--though not by much--once the third card was added to the mix. Note that the Radeons did not scale properly at all in this game. |
| SLI Performance (Cont.) | ||||
Next up, we've got some multi-GPU numbers with Alien vs. Predator and Sleeping Dogs...
Wow. Just wow. The Alien vs. Predator benchmark always ran really well on the Radeon HD 7970, due to the card's wide memory bus, relatively large frame buffer, and high-clocks, but the GeForce GTX Titan SLI configuration easily dispatches the CrossFire setup. And once a third card is added to the mix, performance simply goes through the roof.
More goodness from the GeForce GTX Titan. Performance scaled considerably in the Sleeping Dogs benchmark, and the GeForce GTX Titan SLI configurations clearly lead the pack once again. |
| SLI Performance (Cont. II) | ||||
For our final batch of SLI and CrossFire multi-GPU tests, we've got some numbers from the Metro 2033 benchmark and Crysis 3...
Moving to three GPUs didn't improve performance all that much in the Metro 2033 benchmark, because the game appears to be somewhat CPU limited, but it didn't matter. The GeForce GTX Titans were still the fastest overall.
A single GeForce GTX Titan could already play Crysis 3 with Very High image quality settings. Double or triple up on these monsters though, and they have no trouble at all with this game. The GeForce GTX 680 SLI and Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition CrossFire configurations were evenly matched, but the GeForce GTX Titans were in a league of their own. |
| Multi-Monitor Performance | ||||
Next up, we have some performance data recorded with each of the multi-GPU configurations we tested connected to a trio of 1080p Dell monitors to test NVIDIA's Surround Gaming and AMD's Eyefinity multi-monitor technologies. The combined resolution of the three monitors used for these tests is 5760x1080.
When moving from two to three cards in these particular games, performance didn't scale much with the GeForce GTX Titans, but they still managed to clearly outpace the competition by wide margins. |
| Multi-Monitor Performance (Cont.) | ||||
We continued our multi-monitor and multi-GPU testing with Alien vs. Predator and Crysis 3...
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| GPGPU Performance | ||||||||
We mentioned in our preview article that the GeForce GTX Titan includes a full 64 Double Precision CUDA Cores per SMX versus 192 Single Precision CUDA Cores. But, by default, the GeForce GTX Titan runs its DP cores at 1/8th their full clock speed, since they generally don't benefit gamers Since each SMX has one third the number of DP cores vs. SP cores, double precision operations run at 1/24 the SP rate, which is similar to GeForce GTX 680.
NVIDIA, however, gives users the ability to enable full speed DP in the drive control panel. In order to unlock full performance DP you must open the NVIDIA Control Panel, navigate to “Manage 3D Settings” and under the Global Settings tab find the option titled “CUDA – Double Precision”. Select it, then tick the GeForce GTX Titan checkbox to enable full speed DP. Then click OK and apply the settings. The CUDA – Double Precision listing should then change from “None” to “GeForce GTX Titan”. When full speed DP is enabled though, the GeForce GTX Titan's GPU operates at lower-than-stock frequencies, so this option should be disabled unless you're a GPU-accelerated application that will benefit from it.
We tested the GeForce GTX Titan with an without full DP enabled here. Even with full DP disabled, the Titan is clearly faster than the GeForce GTX 680, due to the increased number of cores available in the GPU. Titan still trails the Radeon HD 7970, however. With full DP enabled though, the Titan's performance jumps up considerably and outpaces all of the other cards we tested.
The Computemark benchmark doesn't benefit from the Titan's full speed DP mode, so we left it disabled for these tests. Regardless, Computemark leverages all of the cores available in the GK110 for its simulations quite well, and as such, the GeForce GTX Titan clearly outpaces all of the other cards here. |
| Overclocking the GeForce GTX Titan | ||||
We spent a little time overclocking the GeForce GTX Titan to see what kind of additional frequency headroom it had left under its hood. For these tests, we used the latest edition of EVGA's Precision X GPU tweaking utility, which is designed to work with Titan.
We did a few things when experimenting with overclocked speeds on Titan. First we tried the most basic option available--we simply changed the temperature target from the default 80'C and increased it to 90'C to see what kind of impact it would have on performance. Then, to push things much further, we increased the power and temperature targets to 105% and 92'C, respectively, and also increased the GPU and Memory clock offsets and ran a few tests.
Interestingly enough, increasing the temperature target to 90'C resulted in a small increase in performance, not only because the GPU was able to run at higher boost frequencies for longer periods, but the boost frequency actually increased as well. Although the default GPU boost clock on Titan is 876MHz, we observed frequencies as high as 993MHz. For our more aggressive overclocking tests, we saw a much higher GPU boost frequency of almost 1.1GHz, and when coupled with higher memory clocks, the performance increases were significant. Hitman in particular showed a 12% increase in performance. Keep in mind, these clocks were possible without manually tweaking the Titan's voltages. With further experimentation, we're certain the GeForce GTX Titan can hit even higher clocks than what we've shown here. |
| Power Consumption, Noise, Temps | ||||
| Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points--namely, power consumption, temperatures, and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored acoustics and tracked how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea of how much power each configuration used while idling and also while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.
Despite offering significantly better performance, the GeForce GTX Titan consumed only slightly more power than the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition while under load. Versus the other GeForce GTX cards, the Titan's power consumption falls right in line with expectations based on its performance--it uses more power than a GeForce GTX 680, but less than the dual GK104-powered GeForce GTX 690.
We've included this temperature data to essentially show the GeForce GTX Titan's idle temperature because reporting the max temp under load is pointless due to GPU Boost 2.0. Because of Titan's GPU Boost 2.0 features, it will run up to the maximum temperature target while under load and throttle voltages and fan speed accordingly to maintain that target temperature. Because the default temperature target is 80'C, the Titan peaked at 80'C under load. Set the temp target to 75'C and that's how high its GPU temperature will go. |
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We really dig the GeForce GTX Titan. It may not offer framerates as high as the dual-GPU powered GeForce GTX 690, but it is the fastest single-GPU powered graphics card by far. The GeForce GTX Titan is also quieter than any other high-end graphics card we’ve tested, it offers some new features not available on any other products yet, and the thing just plain looks cool too. GPU Boost 2.0 offers a lot of flexibility to users who want to tweak acoustics or performance and display overclocking should offer immediate benefits to users willing to experiment and find the sweet spot for their particular monitor, and the card’s massive 6GB frame buffer somewhat future-proofs the card for users that want to play the latest games on multi-monitors at the highest possible settings. Though, nothing available today really taxes a frame buffer that big.
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