NVIDIA TITAN X Review: The Pascal Beast Unleashed

Name: NVIDIA TITAN X
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, August 02, 2016, 11:59 PM EDT

Titan X Shadow of Mordor And Thief Performance

Monolith’s surprisingly fun Orc-slaying title Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, delivers a ton of visual fidelity even at the lowest quality settings. So, to maximize the eye-candy on these high-end graphics cards, we ran the game’s Ultra quality benchmark routine at a couple of resolutions, topping out at 4K -- excuse us, 3840x2160 for the sticklers out there. All of the game's graphics-related options were enabled, along with FXAA and Camera Blur...

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor Performance

Glorious Orc-Slaying Vengeance

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

At this point, we're getting a little repetitive, but the numbers are what they are. As we've seen in every other test up to this point, the TITAN X outpaced all of the other cards at both resolutions. Its lead over the GTX 1080 Founder's Edition opens up to about 30% here at the higher resolution, and pushed the framerate over the 80 FPS mark.

NVIDIA's latest drivers have caused some consistent frametime variations in this game that aren't present with the Radeon. The TITAN X's framerates are so high though, the variations are not perceptible in real-world gameplay and there are no major spikes to speak of.

Thief

DirectX 11 Gaming Performance

Square Enix set the tone for Thief by saying, "Garrett, the Master Thief, steps out of the shadows into the City. In this treacherous place, where the Baron’s Watch spreads a rising tide of fear and oppression, his skills are the only things he can trust. Even the most cautious citizens and their best-guarded possessions are not safe from his reach." The Thief series has been popular for years, not only for its interesting story lines and unique gameplay, but because the games have consistently featured excellent graphics and imagery and leveraged bleeding-edge technology, like AMD's Mantle API, for example.

thief screenshot
Thief

thief1

thief2

The new TITAN X outperformed every other card we tested, yet again, at both resolutions in Thief. Its lead is fairly significant versus the standard GTX 1080, but the gap closes quite a bit with the factory overclocked Gigabyte card. The Maxwell-based TITAN X trailed all of the other cards in this game.

The TITAN X's frametimes are about as perfect as you can get here. There are no major spikes and the frame pacing across the entire run is fairly consistent.