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Benchmarking GeForce GTX Titan 6 GB: Fast, Quiet, Consistent

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We've already covered the features of Nvidia's GeForce GTX Titan, the $1,000 GK110-powered beast set to exist alongside GeForce GTX 690. Now it's time to benchmark the board in one-, two-, and three-way SLI. Is it better than four GK104s working together?

Results: Hitman: Absolution

Resolution: 1920x1080

Strong average frame rates and very similar minimums might suggest that Hitman: Absolution is largely platform-bound, even at its Ultra quality preset. Bottlenecked though this resolution might be, the fact that AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition beats Nvidia’s GeForce GTX Titan is a nice little victory for the Tahiti-based card.

Only the GeForce GTX 680 lags behind when we isolate frame rates over time. It’s also interesting that the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, despite its solid average performance, appears to achieve its average result through somewhat more erratic dips and spikes.

GeForce GTX Titan exhibits very low latencies between frames, all the way through the 95th percentile we’re reporting. None of these numbers are bad though, particularly since all of the frame rates are fairly high.

Resolution: 2560x1600

A higher resolution imparts more of a graphics workload, and our Hitman numbers start separating out a bit.

GeForce GTX 690 maintains its top billing, followed by Titan. Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition drops to third, maintaining its lead over GeForce GTX 680.

The finishing order is quite clear, looking at frame rate over time.

We checked these numbers multiple times—GeForce GTX 680 exhibited higher average consecutive frame latency at 1920x1080 than it does at 2560x1600, while Titan’s latency increased more substantially.

But the bigger news is that AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition again shows a relatively low average latency that starts to balloon above the 95th percentile.

Resolution: 5760x1200

Shifting to 5760x1200 taxes all four graphics cards quite a bit. The GeForce GTX 690 appears to maintain a playable average, and its minimum frame rate of 35 is better than Titan’s average frame rate of 34.

Plotting frame rates over time doesn’t add anything; average FPS already made it pretty clear that the single-GPU cards struggle with this combination of high resolution and high-end detail settings.

Frame rate is more of an issue than consecutive frame latency, though it is notable that AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition exceeds 40 ms in our 95th percentile calculation.

Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini is an Editor Emeritus at Tom's Hardware US. He edits hardware reviews and covers high-profile CPU and GPU launches.
167 Comments Comment from the forums
  • jimbaladin
    For $1000 that card sheath better be made out of platinum.
    Reply
  • aofjax
    Lol, $1000.
    Reply
  • Novuake
    Pure marketing. At that price Nvidia is just pulling a huge stunt... Still an insane card.
    Reply
  • whyso
    if you use an actual 7970 GE card that is sold on newegg, etc instead of the reference 7970 GE card that AMD gave (that you can't find anywhere) thermals and acoustics are different.
    Reply
  • cknobman
    Seems like Titan is a flop (at least at $1000 price point).

    This card would only be compelling if offered in the ~$700 range.

    As for compute? LOL looks like this card being a compute monster goes right out the window. Titan does not really even compete that well with a 7970 costing less than half.
    Reply
  • downhill911
    If titan costs no more than 800USD, then really nice card to have since it does not, i call it a fail card, or hype card. Even my GTX 690 make more since and now you can have them for a really good price on ebay.
    Reply
  • spookyman
    well I am glad I bought the 690GTX.

    Titan is nice but not impressive enough to go buy.
    Reply
  • spentshells
    I feel 2 7970's should have been included in the multi card setups.
    Reply
  • hero1
    jimbaladinFor $1000 that card sheath better be made out of platinum.
    Tell me about it! I think Nvidia shot itself on the foot with the pricing schim. I want AMD to come out with better drivers than current ones to put the 7970 at least 20% ahead of 680 and take all the sales from the greedy green. Sure it performs way better but that price is insane. I think 700-800 is the sweet spot but again it is rare, powerful beast and very consistent which is hard to find atm.
    Reply
  • raxman
    "We did bring these issues up with Nvidia, and were told that they all stem from its driver. Fortunately, that means we should see fixes soon." I suspect their fix will be "Use CUDA".

    Nvidia has really dropped the ball on OpenCL. They don't support OpenCL 1.2, they make it difficult to find all their OpenCL examples. Their link for OpenCL is not easy to find. However their OpenCL 1.1 driver is quite good for Fermi and for the 680 and 690 despite what people say. But if the Titan has troubles it looks like they will be giving up on the driver now as well or purposely crippling it (I can't imagine they did not think to test some OpenCL benchmarks which every review site uses). Nvidia does not care about OpenCL Nvidia users like myself anymore. I wish there more people influential like Linus Torvalds that told Nvidia where to go.
    Reply