Nvidia lands a killing blow on single
GPU performance with this astonishing card
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 $1,250
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
193GB/s memory bandwidth, and comes with only 2GB of GDDR5 as standard.
The
GeForce Titan is an absolute monster of a graphics card
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.
The GeForce GTX Titan is a sign of a
major shift in the cadence of GPU releases
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.
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.
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.
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Specifications
·
Price: $1,250
·
Ratings: 5/6
·
Supplier: www.nvidia.com.au
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2688 CUDA cores
·
6GB GDDR5
·
Dual slot card
·
1 x 6 and 1 x8 PCI-E power connectors
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