How We Tested Nvidia’s Titan Xp 12GB
Nvidia’s latest and greatest will no doubt be found in high-end platforms. Some of these may include Broadwell-E-based systems. However, we’re sticking with our MSI Z170 Gaming M7 motherboard, which was recently upgraded to host a Core i7-7700K CPU. The new processor is complemented by G.Skill’s F4-3000C15Q-16GRR memory kit. Intel’s Skylake architecture remains one of the company’s most effective per clock cycle, and a stock 4.2 GHz frequency is higher than the models with more cores. Crucial’s MX200 SSD remains, as does the Noctua NH-12S cooler and be quiet! Dark Power Pro 10 850W power supply.
As far as competition goes, the Titan Xp is rivaled by its predecessor, the Titan X (Pascal), and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, which is even faster. Those are the three cards we’re comparing, though we’ll pull out a couple of others for our compute-oriented benchmarks.
Our conventional gaming selection now includes Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, Battlefield 1, Doom, Hitman, Metro: Last Light, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Tom Clancy’s The Division, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, and The Witcher 3. We’re also adding Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III. Beyond those conventional titles, we're adding VR testing in Chronos, Serious Sam VR, Arizona Sunshine, and Robo Recall. If you'd like to know more about how we can test graphics cards in VR using Oculus' Rift HMD, check out FCAT VR: GPU And CPU Performance in Virtual Reality.
The test methodology we use for the other games in our suite comes from PresentMon: Performance In DirectX, OpenGL, And Vulkan. In short, all of these games are evaluated using a combination of OCAT and our own in-house GUI for PresentMon, with logging via AIDA64. If you want to know more about our charts (particularly the unevenness index), we recommend reading that story.
All of the numbers you see in today’s piece are fresh, using updated drivers. We’re using build 382.05.
MORE: Best Graphics Cards
MORE: Desktop GPU Performance Hierarchy Table
MORE: All Graphics Content
