GeForce GTX Titan 1600p Performance Review Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,836 words · ~9 min read
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large format highres monitors this is
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the 30in monitor that we used to get our 2560 x600 or 1600p performance results
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you can consider these pretty close to what you'd get if you ran at 2560 by
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1440 the difference actually isn't all that much and we are all about the
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GeForce GTX Titan today this is the
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fastest single GPU card Bar None So what
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that means is compared to dual GPU Solutions such as the 660ti SLI that we
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also ran and the ASUS Aries 2 which we
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also ran which basically amounts to 2 7970 GHz edition cards you will get
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consistently good performance so somewhere between a single GPU and two
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gpus because those ones rely on driver optimizations one of the other things
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that's interesting about Titan from a large format and high resolution
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perspective is the fact that it has six gigs of GPU memory which means not only
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will One Titan perform extremely well at high res but several Titans will perform
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extremely well at high res Titan seeks to do a few things keep Acoustics low
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keep temperatures reasonable deliver outstanding performance and do it all
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with one GPU and reasonable power
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consumption so we're going to be analyzing some of those other things in
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other videos and this video is focused on the performance at greater than 1080p
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resolution now I did a full 1080p review as well and there's a 5760 by 1080
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surround review as well so let's have a
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look at crisis so crisis was always a
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challenge this is Crisis one by the way not crisis 2 and it continues to be a
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challenge so our single GPU card however runs at almost 60 FPS average in Cris 1
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at 2560 x600 crisis has officially been conquered this is at directx10 very high
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presets eight times msaa with motion blur off the only thing that beats the
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Titan in crisis is the Aries 2 so that's
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the Dual 7970 solution and you can see that the Titan actually performs almost
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twice as well as a GTX 680 part of this
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could be due to the fact that it has a much larger frame buffer although I
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doubt it because crisis only used up about 1 gig of vram whereas as the rest
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of it is probably due to the fact that it has about 2.6 uh rather 7.1 billion transistors
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with 2600 Cuda course so moving right along
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yeah Titan performs pretty well but it's about the same as GTX 660 SLI which
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starts to look like a pretty good value here this is an example of how well
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optimized SLI scaling and games that
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don't demand too much in terms of video memory can perform really well compared
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to the Titan at a lower price crisis three was just released so this one is a
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very very interesting case study you can see here the Aries 2 demonstrates why
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sometimes dual GP Solutions are not the answer the Titan tops the performance
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charts beating out the 660 Ti SLI solution but not by much destroying the
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GTX 680 again performing almost D well not quite almost double but 75% better
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than a GTX 680 with the Aries 2 actually coming in behind a single 7970 now the
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reason for that can be any number of things the Aries 2 uses a special driver
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because it's not a standard AMD card so ASUS has their own driver so sometimes
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that can be a little bit behind in terms of optimization it could be Crossfire
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profiles I've seen online that people are finding better success with you know
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using random Crossfire profiles but we were using the default ones
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and yeah so sometimes a dual GPU
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solution can perform the same as a single one or even worse which is one of
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the reasons why I personally always recommend a single GPU solution when you
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can however when you look at the performance in this game 660ti looks
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like a pretty good value considering it performs 90% as well as a Titan but
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actually costs um about 65% as much and
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you can also get 660 Ti in 3 gig configurations Far Cry 3 another high
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performance title another high resolution result here so the Aries 2
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and 660 Ti SLI come out way ahead of any
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of the single GPU Solutions probably the most impressive thing on this on this
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particular chart right here I think Slick's waiting for a video card here have a 7970 is the 7970 that I just
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handed slick the 7970 beats the GTX 680
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by almost 30% only losing to the only
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other single GPU card in our test which is the Titan and that was only by about
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20% so it takes a dual GPU solution both NVIDIA and AMD scaled incredibly well in
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this game with NVIDIA getting about almost double the scaling and AMD
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getting about about 50 60% scaling so that's
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very very very cool stuff to see but definite nod to AMD and definite nod to
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dual GPU Solutions here again a game where perhaps the six gig frame buffer
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is not a benefit to the Titan Skyrim now Skyrim we're not running the same way we
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used to we've added a whole bunch of mods about 18 mods from the Steam
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Workshop making it much more demanding than it is in its bone stock
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configuration which is what we used to run and that's part of the reason why
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when I used to show these performance graphs you'd never really see any difference between the Cards now that
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has all changed the big winner here again is 660 Ti SLI with Titan coming up
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next GTX 680 coming up next and the AMD cards bringing up the rear so this is a
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game that seems to be better optimized for NVIDIA although that could be a
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function of the mods we're running actually running better on NVIDIA so we
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just selected mods that we thought looked really good and kind of went from
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there Battlefield 3 getting to be a bit of an older game but still very telling
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so the Aries 3 remember this one has three gigs per GP did I say Aries 3 I
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meant Aries 2 has three gigs of RAM per GPU so once again we're running into a
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situation where we don't need that 6 gigs yet however as 4K resolution starts
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becoming more popular or if you want to run surround that might be more of a
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factor but when you don't need the extra RAM more GPU horsepower seems to really
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work out for you and in this particular game the Aries 2 performed almost double
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as well as a single 7970 making it by
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far the ruler of the roost in Battlefield 3 best possible solution you
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could get very similar results by using dual 797s at a much more reasonable
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price as well which is part of the reason that you shouldn't just completely ignore the Aries 2 on the
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graphs because that solution is available for less than the cost of a
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Titan not necessarily more the Aries 2
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actually costs about $500 $600 more than a GeForce GTX Titan so the Tian comes in
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a tie with the 660 Ti SLI which again is
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because we didn't need the vram with the other two single GPU Solutions bringing
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up the rear once again Metro 2033 is a very interesting case study
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excellent scaling again double the performance of a single 7970 with the
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Aries 2 highlighting why dual GPU Solutions are often very awesome however
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looking at the 660 Ti compared to the 680 we see why dual GPU Solutions aren't
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always necessarily that great Titan puts up a great showing again just destroying
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the numbers from the GTX 680 beating it by about 50 60%
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here Witcher 2 is the last game in our
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suite and I made a bit of a mistake on the graph but you guys won't know that
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because I'll fix it before I show it to you so don't worry about it uh so Witcher 2 at 1600p Ultra preset
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including Uber sampling really didn't give as much of an edge to the Titan as
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I had thought because Titan relies on lots of vram and Uber sound Ling just or
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rather Titan relies on lots of vram to separate itself from Dual GPU Solutions
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um Witcher 2 I thought would demand more vram because of the fact that we had
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Uber sampling on but the Aries 2 pulls away from everything else in Witcher 2
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just proving that sometimes just more GPU horsepower is better than more
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memory or a larger single GPU however the Titan does put up a pretty good
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showing again tying the 660 Ti and beating the GTX 680 by about
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50% so what do all of this mean it means
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that looking at current resolutions like 2560 x600 if you're only running a
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single monitor you may actually not get
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$1,000 worth of benefit with a GTX Titan
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especially when you compare it to Solutions like two GTX 660 Ti in SLI or
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two competing cards running in crossfire
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however if you were to run a multi-way
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configuration Titan would be the solution to go with because running a
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multi-way configuration presumably you're running at a very high resolution
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whether it's 4K or whether it's in surround and that's where you'll
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hopefully start to benefit from the additional RAM and the other situation
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where Titan starts to make sense is in a small form factor configuration Aries 2
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pulled a good couple hundred more watts from the power supply than Titan that
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does show up on your power bill and that does affect both the heat output as well
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as the noise of your system so Titan's a
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great solution if you're looking to build a compact gaming rig so this is
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another situation where dual 660 Ti might not make sense because you need at
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least four expansion slots to even fit those so do you have to pay a premium
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for that single GPU single card high performance solution yes but if you're
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trying to work within a confined space if you're trying to get more vram or if
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you're a professional who wants to make use of the fact that the double
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Precision floating Point performance of this card is not crippled like it was on
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previous generation consumer models then something like a Titan might make sense
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