so what is Titan actually for if not
high resolution gaming such as the kind that you would do if you had triple
monitors so our triple monitor setup for
testing Titan was actually three 1920 by
1200 monitors so for all intents and purposes our results are going to be
pretty similar to what you'd see running 3 108 P monitors it's a little bit more
demanding but you can kind of extrapolate down a little bit and it
gives you some idea how this solution's going to perform so the Titan's main
advantage when running high resolution is that it has 6 gigs of video memory so
that's in addition to the 2500 some OD Cuda cores the large 7.1 billion
transistor GPU and just generally
overall Beast design ours ran at
1.13 GHz or so consistently with GPU
boost that's on air cooling with water cooling it'll do more so it's got a lot
going for it but what it doesn't have going for it is the fact that it is only
one GPU and it does have to go up against competing dual GPU Solutions so
the main contenders for this one actually well all the solutions that we
ran were the GTX Titan the ASUS Aries 2
so this is a dual 7970 GHz Edition card
that actually is a very very very custom card very expensive but we used that to
represent 7970 Crossfire as well as just
sort of that you know what graphics card out there actually costs more than a
Titan well this one and you know see how see how those stack up against each
other we ran a single 7970 with its three gigs of video memory
7970 often often often gets recommended
over GTX 680 for surround setups and
last but not least we ran two GTX 660 Ti
and SLI to see how these are two gig
cards only to see how those stack up just having more GPU power and actually
last that one wasn't last we ran a GTX 680 so that's a 3 gig card so that gives
us some idea how that rather 2 gig card
excuse me so that gives us some idea how these still high performance similar to
a 7970 but uh more frame buffer limited
cards will perform so without further Ado oh this is all on our 3930k at 4 GHz
test bench with 16 gigs of RAM and all cards are overclocked you can find the
card overclocks in the shared Google document that I share so that you guys
can see what our cards are clocked at they're all at very reasonable clocks that should be attainable by you pretty
much pretty easily all right so let's start with crisis can it run crisis ha
ha haa the joke that never gets old on the internet uh until it takes an arrow
to the knee and dies or retires or does whatever it does that's that's funny
right and planking planking is still funny I don't know forget about it so
crisis okay Advantage Aries 2 the Aries
2 absolutely walks away with Crisis crisis is an older game so the textures
are not as not high resolution enough that Titan would benefit from its 6 gigs
of video memory so Aries 2 goes yeah okay we want more GPU horsepower also
excellent Crossfire scaling helps the Aries 2 perform more than twice as well
as a 7970 something that uh early on in
my crossfire testing days would have said oh that's that's an anomaly there's
no way that can be possible you know what sometimes it actually happens it's
very very bizarre so for single GPU Solutions 680 and 7970 are pretty close
again no Advantage for the 7970 with its 3 GB frame buffer but the Titan leaves
them both behind out performing them both by about 50% 660 tili demonstrates
why sometimes a dual GPU solution is not a great one so while Titan may be very
expensive sometimes it can be worthwhile to run a single GPU because driver
issues can force an otherwise theoretically more powerful solution to
not really do very well now we just saw Crisis 3 launch so we also ran Crisis 3
where Titan stole the show so Titan outperformed everything else in Crisis 3
including the 660 Ti and SLI although it should be noted that 660 Ti and SLI are
significantly less expensive than a Titan destroyed the GTX 680 destroyed
the Aries 2 which actually performed worse than the 7970 so this is an
example where 660ti demonstrated that
it's all about drivers so on our previous game crisis 1 AMD benefited
from Dual GPU while NVIDIA didn't at all and in Crisis 3 NVIDIA benefits from
Dual GPU at 5760 by by 1080 or rather by
12200 whereas AMD doesn't at all so it
comes down to the individual games you're going to play whereas a single GPU solution always performs well and we
see that with the Titan Far Cry 3
another hot title Aries 2 just runs away with this one Far Cry 3 generally runs
better on AMD cards and that Trend
continued and nothing really unexpected here it performs almost twice as fast as
a single 7970 and it takes the GTX 660 Ti and SLI
to even I mean they're not even close GTX 660 Ti and SLI are only slightly
faster than a Titan which is significantly faster than GTX 680 and
7970 but you can see the AMD optimizations that have gone into this
particular game Skyrim was an
interesting one this is a bit of a challenge with surround gaming in
general game support is not always there
even for games that are extremely modable so Skyrim is uh is very modable
our our stock test configuration for Skyrim has 18 mods installed from Steam
Workshop but it didn't actually work on either our NVIDIA or our AMD test
platforms to get it going in surround there was a there was a patch that used
to work but then there's a newer patch of Skyrim now it doesn't work anymore so
I'm really excited about 4K displays one to help us really push these gpus
because that's even higher resolution than 3x 1080 and the other is um the
fact that we don't have to deal with surround to get just super high
resolution images and higher pixel density is another good thing as well
moving right along to Battlefield 3 Titan steals the show again just
narrowly edging out 660 tili by about 5%
which beat Aries 2 as well so this is a game that sort of like uh Far Cry 3 was
for AMD this one favors NVIDIA pretty
immensely so GTX 680 walks all over 7970
and then the Dual GPU Solutions um
actually do the same thing to each other that the single GPU Solutions did to
each other with only the Titan sort of emerging on top and I mean you look at
the GPU that the Dual GPU scaling actually AMD scales well but didn't have
great performance to begin with whereas NVIDIA didn't scale quite as well but
had better performance to begin with
next up is Metro 2033 which is the first game where we really see the higher
frame buffer gpus pull away from the lower frame buffer gpus so the 680 and
the 660ti both look like they ran out of memory because the performance just
falls off a cliff compared to where they were hanging with their equivalent
Solutions throughout most of our testing so while we don't necessarily need all
six gigs that you have on the Titan for this particular bench it does show that
there are modern games or even older games that at higher resolutions like
when 4K displays start showing up will benefit from more memory so yeah three
gigs is is enough for this particular game but what if we did scale to 4K what
if uh you know uh what if an upcoming title scales to 4K maybe 6 gigs will be
needed in the near future um especially if you want to run it the very very
highest detail I mean I guess needed is sort of a strong word but uh anyway in
this one Aries 2 steals the show Titan comes in exactly where it belongs and
moving on to Witcher 2 so Witcher 2 made
that point again this was the first game
that we encountered where it looks like with Uber sampling on so we were running
on the ultra preset including Uber sampling none of the cards were actually
even able to run the game in surround
except for GTX Titan now on the AMD card
that's partly due to the fact that CD project red does not allow AMD
configurations to run in ifinity in their surround uh setup and that's for
whatever reason that they decided toimplement that because there was a
hack at some point and then they turned it off for whatever reason um but
neither of the other NVIDIA Solutions were even able to launch the game so
this is one where we are actually benefiting from not only the horsepower
of Titan but also the huge frame buffer and this brings into the picture how
Titan is intended to be used so it's low it's low noise it's relatively small for
a high performance GPU I mean it's 10.5 in which is I guess pretty big but it's
not the biggest GPU ever made that's for sure and it is quiet so you can either
put it in a small high performance system or you can take a bunch of them
and stack them together wicher two scales extremely well even up to
three-way SLI we've shown this in the past with GTX 660 Ti so what that means
is you could take a few of these guys you could probably eek out around 45 to
50 FPS with Witcher 2 at 5760 by 1080
Ultra preset and have enough video memory to do it so it's a very unique
solution that way a very futuristic solution that way although maybe not
necessarily the most coste effective one
thank you for checking out our video on surround gaming with the latest high-end
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