GeForce GTX Titan NVIDIA Surround Performance Review Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,806 words · ~9 min read
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so what is Titan actually for if not
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high resolution gaming such as the kind that you would do if you had triple
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monitors so our triple monitor setup for
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testing Titan was actually three 1920 by
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1200 monitors so for all intents and purposes our results are going to be
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pretty similar to what you'd see running 3 108 P monitors it's a little bit more
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demanding but you can kind of extrapolate down a little bit and it
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gives you some idea how this solution's going to perform so the Titan's main
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advantage when running high resolution is that it has 6 gigs of video memory so
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that's in addition to the 2500 some OD Cuda cores the large 7.1 billion
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transistor GPU and just generally
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overall Beast design ours ran at
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1.13 GHz or so consistently with GPU
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boost that's on air cooling with water cooling it'll do more so it's got a lot
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going for it but what it doesn't have going for it is the fact that it is only
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one GPU and it does have to go up against competing dual GPU Solutions so
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the main contenders for this one actually well all the solutions that we
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ran were the GTX Titan the ASUS Aries 2
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so this is a dual 7970 GHz Edition card
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that actually is a very very very custom card very expensive but we used that to
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represent 7970 Crossfire as well as just
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sort of that you know what graphics card out there actually costs more than a
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Titan well this one and you know see how see how those stack up against each
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other we ran a single 7970 with its three gigs of video memory
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7970 often often often gets recommended
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over GTX 680 for surround setups and
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last but not least we ran two GTX 660 Ti
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and SLI to see how these are two gig
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cards only to see how those stack up just having more GPU power and actually
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last that one wasn't last we ran a GTX 680 so that's a 3 gig card so that gives
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us some idea how that rather 2 gig card
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excuse me so that gives us some idea how these still high performance similar to
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a 7970 but uh more frame buffer limited
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cards will perform so without further Ado oh this is all on our 3930k at 4 GHz
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test bench with 16 gigs of RAM and all cards are overclocked you can find the
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card overclocks in the shared Google document that I share so that you guys
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can see what our cards are clocked at they're all at very reasonable clocks that should be attainable by you pretty
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much pretty easily all right so let's start with crisis can it run crisis ha
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ha haa the joke that never gets old on the internet uh until it takes an arrow
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to the knee and dies or retires or does whatever it does that's that's funny
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right and planking planking is still funny I don't know forget about it so
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crisis okay Advantage Aries 2 the Aries
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2 absolutely walks away with Crisis crisis is an older game so the textures
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are not as not high resolution enough that Titan would benefit from its 6 gigs
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of video memory so Aries 2 goes yeah okay we want more GPU horsepower also
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excellent Crossfire scaling helps the Aries 2 perform more than twice as well
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as a 7970 something that uh early on in
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my crossfire testing days would have said oh that's that's an anomaly there's
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no way that can be possible you know what sometimes it actually happens it's
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very very bizarre so for single GPU Solutions 680 and 7970 are pretty close
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again no Advantage for the 7970 with its 3 GB frame buffer but the Titan leaves
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them both behind out performing them both by about 50% 660 tili demonstrates
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why sometimes a dual GPU solution is not a great one so while Titan may be very
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expensive sometimes it can be worthwhile to run a single GPU because driver
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issues can force an otherwise theoretically more powerful solution to
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not really do very well now we just saw Crisis 3 launch so we also ran Crisis 3
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where Titan stole the show so Titan outperformed everything else in Crisis 3
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including the 660 Ti and SLI although it should be noted that 660 Ti and SLI are
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significantly less expensive than a Titan destroyed the GTX 680 destroyed
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the Aries 2 which actually performed worse than the 7970 so this is an
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example where 660ti demonstrated that
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it's all about drivers so on our previous game crisis 1 AMD benefited
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from Dual GPU while NVIDIA didn't at all and in Crisis 3 NVIDIA benefits from
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Dual GPU at 5760 by by 1080 or rather by
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12200 whereas AMD doesn't at all so it
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comes down to the individual games you're going to play whereas a single GPU solution always performs well and we
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see that with the Titan Far Cry 3
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another hot title Aries 2 just runs away with this one Far Cry 3 generally runs
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better on AMD cards and that Trend
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continued and nothing really unexpected here it performs almost twice as fast as
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a single 7970 and it takes the GTX 660 Ti and SLI
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to even I mean they're not even close GTX 660 Ti and SLI are only slightly
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faster than a Titan which is significantly faster than GTX 680 and
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7970 but you can see the AMD optimizations that have gone into this
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particular game Skyrim was an
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interesting one this is a bit of a challenge with surround gaming in
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general game support is not always there
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even for games that are extremely modable so Skyrim is uh is very modable
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our our stock test configuration for Skyrim has 18 mods installed from Steam
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Workshop but it didn't actually work on either our NVIDIA or our AMD test
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platforms to get it going in surround there was a there was a patch that used
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to work but then there's a newer patch of Skyrim now it doesn't work anymore so
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I'm really excited about 4K displays one to help us really push these gpus
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because that's even higher resolution than 3x 1080 and the other is um the
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fact that we don't have to deal with surround to get just super high
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resolution images and higher pixel density is another good thing as well
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moving right along to Battlefield 3 Titan steals the show again just
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narrowly edging out 660 tili by about 5%
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which beat Aries 2 as well so this is a game that sort of like uh Far Cry 3 was
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for AMD this one favors NVIDIA pretty
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immensely so GTX 680 walks all over 7970
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and then the Dual GPU Solutions um
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actually do the same thing to each other that the single GPU Solutions did to
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each other with only the Titan sort of emerging on top and I mean you look at
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the GPU that the Dual GPU scaling actually AMD scales well but didn't have
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great performance to begin with whereas NVIDIA didn't scale quite as well but
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had better performance to begin with
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next up is Metro 2033 which is the first game where we really see the higher
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frame buffer gpus pull away from the lower frame buffer gpus so the 680 and
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the 660ti both look like they ran out of memory because the performance just
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falls off a cliff compared to where they were hanging with their equivalent
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Solutions throughout most of our testing so while we don't necessarily need all
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six gigs that you have on the Titan for this particular bench it does show that
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there are modern games or even older games that at higher resolutions like
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when 4K displays start showing up will benefit from more memory so yeah three
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gigs is is enough for this particular game but what if we did scale to 4K what
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if uh you know uh what if an upcoming title scales to 4K maybe 6 gigs will be
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needed in the near future um especially if you want to run it the very very
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highest detail I mean I guess needed is sort of a strong word but uh anyway in
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this one Aries 2 steals the show Titan comes in exactly where it belongs and
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moving on to Witcher 2 so Witcher 2 made
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that point again this was the first game
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that we encountered where it looks like with Uber sampling on so we were running
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on the ultra preset including Uber sampling none of the cards were actually
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even able to run the game in surround
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except for GTX Titan now on the AMD card
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that's partly due to the fact that CD project red does not allow AMD
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configurations to run in ifinity in their surround uh setup and that's for
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whatever reason that they decided toimplement that because there was a
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hack at some point and then they turned it off for whatever reason um but
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neither of the other NVIDIA Solutions were even able to launch the game so
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this is one where we are actually benefiting from not only the horsepower
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of Titan but also the huge frame buffer and this brings into the picture how
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Titan is intended to be used so it's low it's low noise it's relatively small for
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a high performance GPU I mean it's 10.5 in which is I guess pretty big but it's
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not the biggest GPU ever made that's for sure and it is quiet so you can either
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put it in a small high performance system or you can take a bunch of them
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and stack them together wicher two scales extremely well even up to
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three-way SLI we've shown this in the past with GTX 660 Ti so what that means
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is you could take a few of these guys you could probably eek out around 45 to
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50 FPS with Witcher 2 at 5760 by 1080
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Ultra preset and have enough video memory to do it so it's a very unique
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solution that way a very futuristic solution that way although maybe not
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necessarily the most coste effective one
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thank you for checking out our video on surround gaming with the latest high-end
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gpus don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips for more unboxings reviews and
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