Make no bones about it, the GeForce Titan is an absolute monster of a
graphics card, a true flagship product that has been developed without
compromise and worth every bit of its massive $1250 pricetag. It is also
overkill for the vast majority of the population, a product purely for
those who spend their evenings lusting over silicon, rather than a
must-have gaming accessory.
Titan is Nvidia’s Kepler GPU at its most potent, with 2688 CUDA cores
and 288GB/s memory bandwidth driving 6GB of GDDR5. In contrast, the
already excellent GeForce GTX 680 GPU has 1536 CUDA cores and 192GB/s
memory bandwidth, and comes with only 2GB of GDDR5 as standard.
Titan achieves this massive bump thanks to the use of Nvidia’s GK110
core, which has previously been unavailable to consumers (the GTX 680
and 690 cards use the lesser GK104 core). Until now it has only been
used to power Tesla cards for use in the Cray Titan supercomputer, a
heritage that gives the card its name.
If anything, the GeForce GTX Titan is a sign of a major shift in the
cadence of GPU releases. There is an almost overarching belief that new
GPUs need to land along the 18 month timeline determined by Moore’s Law,
but the reality is that we have reached a point where massive jumps in
theoretical performance don’t translate to real world boosts. This is
down to a variety of factors, from the stagnation of mainstream PC
monitors at 1920 x 1080 resolution, through to the age of the current
generation consoles. Given the sheer prevalence of multiplatform game
development, games rarely do anything to tax bleeding edge GPUs, and
this is a situation unlikely to change with the launch of the
Playstation 4 and whatever Microsoft ends up calling Durango.
Despite this stagnation of the mainstream, there are still edge cases
where a GeForce GTX 680 or Radeon HD 7970 don’t deliver enough
performance to satisfy. We are talking exotic resolutions like 2560 x
1440, as well as higher resolutions delivered by multi-monitor setups.
These are out there, but they are definitely the exception to the rule.
In a lot of cases gamers running such setups need to resort to
multi-GPU solutions through SLI or Crossfire, or single-card, dual-GPU
products like Nvidia’s GTX 690 or the handful of semi-official Radeon HD
7990 cards. The inherent problem with these is that driver support can
often be patchy, and the situation where newly released games can’t take
advantage of the dual GPU solutions is all too common.
This is the niche that Titan occupies, and does so in a quite
spectacular manner. It delivers huge performance in our standard
benchmarks, and was capable of feats of graphical brilliance in the
GPU-torturing Crysis 3 that we found other cards incapable of.
In Crysis 3 we were able to max out every graphics setting, turn on
FXAA and run it at 2560 x 1600 resolution and still see framerates just
over a very playable 30fps. This is where the 6GB of memory on Titan
really comes into its own – most GPUs struggle with any sort of AA at
high resolutions, largely because they run out of memory.
In 3DMark we saw Titan score 8389 in the high-end Fire Strike test,
significantly ahead of the 6090 scored by the GTX 680, but still behind
the dual GPU Asus ARES II card, which managed 11,711. This shows the
massive single-GPU advantages delivered by Titan, while also indicating
that dual-GPU solutions are quicker in the right circumstances.
Ultimately this is where both the strengths and weaknesses of the GTX
Titan lie. A dual-GPU setup is going to be a faster solution in pretty
much every case, but dual-GPU cards cost notably more than Titan, while
also suffering from the issue that you are more beholden to driver
updates to play cutting edge games. On the other hand Titan doesn’t have
this driver issue, and also delivers the fastest single-GPU performance
on the market by a long, long way.
Source: pcauthority.com.au
