Leaked NVIDIA TITAN V Benchmarks Show Volta GPU Demolishing All Competitors
We say "unofficial" because there is always the chance these benchmarks are fake. We do not know how many of these cards NVIDIA might have shipped out to reviewers, but however many it is, they are surely under an NDA. That said, it is not uncommon for benchmarks to leak out ahead of schedule. Assuming the impressive numbers are legit (which we'll get to in a moment), performance will only get better in time as NVIDIA tweaks its drivers.
To quickly recap, the TITAN V sports a 21.1-billion transistor GV100 GPU that is manufactured on a 12nm FFN high-performance process, customized by NVIDIA. It has 5,120 CUDA cores, 640 Tensor cores, a 1,200MHz base clock and 1,455MHz boost clock, and a whopping 12GB of HBM2 memory running at 1.7Gbps, with a 3,072-bit interface for an effective 653GB/s of memory bandwidth. That's quite the bark, now let's look at its bite.
The TITAN V was put through its paces in several different benchmarks, including 3DMark Fire Strike. Running at stock clocks and using NVIDA's latest 388.59 WHQL drivers, the card posted a graphics score of 32,774. That listing is no longer showing up on Futuremark's website. However, it does still show performance numbers with the card overclocked by 170MHz, which bumped up the score to nearly 36,000 points (35,991, to be precise).
To put those numbers into perspective, a TITAN Xp based on NVIDA's Pascal GPU architecture typically scores around 28,000, as does the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. The TITAN V is a good clip faster, especially when overclocked.
Unigine's Superposition benchmark also yielded some impressive numbers. At stock speeds, the TITAN V scored 5,222 in the 8K preset, and 9,431 in the 1080p Extreme preset. The latter is particularly interesting—famed overclocker Kingpin had previously taken a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, stripped off the heatsink and bathed the card in liquid nitrogen (LN2), and overclocked it to 2,581MHz, which resulted in a score 8,642 in the 1080p Extreme preset. The TITAN V scored nearly 800 points higher.
The TITAN V was also put its paces in some gaming benchmarks, not just synthetic ones. They include Ashes of the Singularity, Ashes of the Singularity DX12, Rise of the Tomb Raider (1440p), and Gears of War 4. Here is a look at those:
In short, this is a very strong showing for the TITAN V, and bodes well for NVIDIA's Volta GPU, which should trickle down into consumer-based gaming cards sometime next year. Not that you can't plunk down $3,000 for a TITAN V and use it for gaming, but this card is really aimed at scientists and researchers.
What's also interesting to note is a screenshot of EVGA's Precision X OC seemingly supporting the TITAN V. We've reached out to EVGA to see if this is truly the case and will update when we hear back. In the meantime, we should mention the clocks on the TITAN V. Its 1,200MHz base clock and 1,455MHz boost clock are slower than both the TITAN Xp (1,417MHz / 1,480MHz) and GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (1,480MHz / 1,582MHz). The fact that the TITAN V was able to achieve a comfortable lead with a clockspeed disadvantage (at stock) is a testament to Volta and the work that NVIDIA has put into the GPU.
Of course, NVIDIA is not in a rush to bring Volta to the consumer market, as AMD has not fully caught up with Pascal (Vega comes close). The silver lining to that is it gives NVIDIA time to tweak things and flesh out better drivers for when Volta does infiltrate the mainstream gaming sector. Based on what we've seen here, we can hardly wait.
