Testing Nvidia's $1,000 Graphics Card: GeForce GTX Titan Review

Julio Franco

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"...if you have $1,000 burning a hole in your pocket..." funniest thing I've ever read in a computer hardware review.

I'm still laughing!
 
"...if you have $1,000 burning a hole in your pocket..." funniest thing I've ever read in a computer hardware review.

I'm still laughing!
If I had $1000 burning a hole in my pocket I certainly wouldn't throw it around on a graphics card. That said it is a very nice card & I would love it but it's price renders it redundant imo but somehow I don't think Nvidia will have much of a problem shifting it. There's always gonna be people willing to shell out for something as frivolous as this card. If it cost $ 500, I myself may be tempted. I guess it's not for me. Too rich for my blood.
 
If I had $1000 burning a hole in my pocket I certainly wouldn't throw it around on a graphics card. That said it is a very nice card & I would love it but it's price renders it redundant imo but somehow I don't think Nvidia will have much of a problem shifting it.
The card seems to be selling fairly well if the Titan owners threads are any indication
There's always gonna be people willing to shell out for something as frivolous as this card.
Might pay to remember that the Titan is essentially a higher clocked Tesla K20X without ECC memory and MPI, so gaming, OCD, and competitive benchmarking aren't the only markets. As Anandtech noted:
Titan, its compute performance, and the possibilities it unlocks is a very big deal for researchers and other professionals that need every last drop of compute performance that they can get, for as cheap as they can get it. This is why on the compute front Titan stands alone; in NVIDIA’s consumer product lineup there’s nothing like it, and even AMD’s Tahiti based cards (7970, etc), while potent, are very different from GK110/Kepler in a number of ways. Titan essentially writes its own ticket here.

At a $1000 it still represents a substantial saving over shelling out $4500 on a K20X

If it cost $ 500, I myself may be tempted. I guess it's not for me. Too rich for my blood.
At $500 it would pretty much mean that the GTX 680 to $299 considering relative performance, added vRAM and bill of materials in general...and of course a realignment to the whole product stack. Nice idea, but I couldn't see Nvidia's (or AMD for that matter) shareholders being overly thrilled at that prospect.

Steve
Thanks for another nicely executed review. Good to see the frame latency benching additions
 
This card was meant to be the GTX680.But when Nvidia found their lower cards were faster than AMDs flagship gpu they renamed the whole range.Nvidia are laughing all the way to the bank.
 
This card was meant to be the GTX680.But when Nvidia found their lower cards were faster than AMDs flagship gpu they renamed the whole range.Nvidia are laughing all the way to the bank.
I'm not buying into this story. Sounds an awful lot like rumors being passed off as fact.

For nVidia to drop their number scheme, they must have planned the cards name from the beginning. Especially one such as the Titan being named after a supercomputer, you would never get me to believe it was originally meant to be the GTX680.
 
While I applaud that you're using now the 99th porcentile test to check on latency, it would be nicer if you would make a table of what the numbers mean. Like for example FPS, must of us literate on games and graphic cards already now that 15FPS Is intolerable, 35 is the bare minimum, and 60 and up is desirable... But in latency I just now X milliseconds is better than Y milliseconds, but not if the difference is something I should mind when making my buying decision...

About the Titan, well I think it's just ahead of its time... I can't see AMD showing something equally or better soon...
 
But in latency I just now X milliseconds is better than Y milliseconds
Same here, I'm clueless as to where one would draw an intolerable line.

Guy's milliseconds is still a time measurement. 1 second is made up of 1000ms so 16ms = 60fps.

16 ms = 60 FPS
33 ms = 30 FPS
40 ms = 25 FPS
50 ms = 20 FPS

"...if you have $1,000 burning a hole in your pocket..." funniest thing I've ever read in a computer hardware review.

I'm still laughing!

Glad you enjoyed that.
 
Guy's milliseconds is still a time measurement. 1 second is made up of 1000ms so 16ms = 60fps.

16 ms = 60 FPS
33 ms = 30 FPS
40 ms = 25 FPS
50 ms = 20 FPS
Come on guys, simple maths...

Great work on the frame latencies, because a pure average fps is definitely not the whole story.

As for the Titan itself it's insanely priced compared to GTX 660Ti SLI or 7950 CF, and the sad thing is neither Nvidia nor AMD seem to have anything up their sleeves for a good while yet.
 
Come on guys, simple maths....
Yes it was and didn't answer the question on where a line to intolerable would be drawn. In fact the answers given was frame time for different FPS. That was not an answer for a latency question or how much could be tolerated.

Here is the question;
Whats tolerable 1FPS latency @60FPS or can you go as high as 10FPS latency @60FPS?
 
If I didn't already have three (only use two for gaming) 7970's, I too would most likely be looking at buying this card as a single card solution for gaming at 2560x1600. It would be nice not to have to worry about SLI/Crossfire issues.
 
I was pretty impressed that the 660Ti SLI system was able to produce such low frame latencies by comparison. Sleeping Dogs and Medal of Honor were still pretty bad by frame latency, but the SLI system was right on par with the other games.
 
Here is the question;
Whats tolerable 1FPS latency @60FPS or can you go as high as 10FPS latency @60FPS?
Latency is measured in ms and the lower the better. The review methodology is explained in the article, I.e. the latency figure displayed is a 99th percentile. e.g. for BF3 @1080p the 99th percentile is 10.6ms so 99% of the frames were generated in less than 10.6ms, or to put it another way 99% of the time you're getting above 94fps (1000/10.6).

So a 99th percentile frame time of under 16.7ms (I.e. 60fps+) would result in very smooth gameplay.
 
Personally, though nVidia may be touting this card as a gamer's card, I think the market for this card is really going to be the HPC market. Its DP compute performance is what the 680 should have had, however, it's price still makes it a very attractive and inexpensive alternative to a Tesla yet none the less capable. I am willing to bet that the Titan will fly off the shelves into supercomputer builds.

That said, I think none but the most deep-pocketed, got to have the latest and greatest hardware gamers will be attracted to this card especially when gaming alternatives exist that are cheaper to implement.
 
I was caught a bit off guard by the pricing of this card. I had been saving up for a while for three of whatever the next single gpu flagship was going to be to replace my 680s... but I'm just not willing to part with $3k just for the video. Because of that I'll be passing on this line altogether. It upset me a bit just as AMD's pricing of the 7970 upset me at launch. I'll be spending that money on a new pair of headphones and a DAC/AMP instead.

Awesome review though!
 
Do you think you could benchmark Tomb Raider with this card? That TressFX combined with ultimate settings on my GTX480 runs 1FPS then crashes out after 5 seconds.
 
Well... here's my take. Have been in this business for easily a decade, having seen all sorts of ridiculous cards, this one is the one that costs the MOST while delivering the LEAST... this thing is just absurd. There were X1950 XTX Toxics but the Tide Water that came with them and their excellent OC'ing potential or lowered down prices made them well worthwhile, there were waterblocked 8800 Ultra's, which again became somewhat worth it after they've settled down. And there were TEC water chilled 8800 GTX's, YET, they STILL had something to make up to their price tag.

But this one? This one is just one giant, pointless piece of ****. All that magnesium shroud does is to take the card's price to an insane grand, and the actual build quality is NOTHING special with Taiwan made TRIO chokes and typical high-K MOSFET's. $1000 and no Volterra VRM or CPL chokes or anything of that sort... sigh. Just a 680 with 16 SMX cores rather than 15 active, on a roided PCB/cooler.

Once you start pushing volts into a Galaxy 680 White beyond 1350 Mhz, it can pull the heals of this thing. And I bought mine for $520... hell, even a good chipped $400 reference 7970 can get up to that level of performance with an insane OC on it... sigh.
 
I really think the GTX 690 should have be included within the comparisons. If, for anything, just to see how the TITAN stacks up.
 
I though 100ms made up 1 second not 1000ms

Uhm, no. In the metric system, 'mili' stands for x1000 times the division of 1. A kilometer is 1000 metres, as such, 1000 milimeters is 1 meter and 1000 miliseconds equal to a second.

If 100ms made up one sec, then you'd have to lag to terribly and skip an entire frame one after the other while playing with 100 ping online... it's an extremely simple math.

The U.S education system really needs a TON of reconsideration in the math section... beginning with changing the imperial system to the metric system. Feets, miles. yards need to die already. We aren't in 1400's anymore where people calculated **** by how many steps they put out...
 
Thanks for putting me down, but ok im surpriced that I notice frame latency in bf3 since 1000ms is
1sec and im only getting 15-20ms frame lag and when some review test tvs they say 28ms is bad
and 50ms is horible but thats not even 1/10th of a second delay.
 
Where was the GTX 690 in this comparison? You need Nvidia's flagship out there as well to be fair.
 
Thanks for putting me down, but ok im surpriced that I notice frame latency in bf3 since 1000ms is
1sec and im only getting 15-20ms frame lag and when some review test tvs they say 28ms is bad
and 50ms is horible but thats not even 1/10th of a second delay.

15-20ms FRAME lag means LESS than 60 FPS:

16 ms = 60 FPS
33 ms = 30 FPS

It has absolutely NOTHING to do with 15-20ms NET PING lag.
 
I didnt say anything to do with network lag I looking at the the cpu and gpu graph in battlefield 3 and it shows u latency bettween cpu/gpu using command:
  • Render.perfoverlayvisible 1
 
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