Manufacturer: Gigabyte Price: $ 1000 US Author: Steve Date: 03/06/2013

[ Introduction ]

Today we have Nvidia’s new $1000 graphics card on the test bed thanks to Gigabyte, who have provided us with a sample of their card. Known as the GeForce GTX Titan, this monster graphics card is set to become the world’s fastest single GPU period. Check it out as we throw the usual mix of games at it, along with some SLI and Crossfire comparisons... Almost one year ago Nvidia debuted their Kepler architecture with the current GeForce GTX 600 series and they did so with the GTX 680. The GeForce GTX 680 has been the flagship single-GPU current generation part for almost 12 months now. Since its release the GTX 680 caused AMD to restructure their Radeon HD 7900 series pricing as well as warrant the introduction of a special 7970 GHz Edition. The GeForce GTX 680 has been a noteworthy achievement for Nvidia as this 28nm part managed to cram 3540 million transistors into a relatively small 294mm2 die. The end result was an impressive 18.74 Gigaflops per watt along with a memory bandwidth of 192.2GB/s. These figures were achieved by giving the GTX 680 a total of 1536 CUDA cores, 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs. Although this was a massive step up from the GeForce GTX 580 which featured 512 CUDA cores, 48 ROP (Raster Operations) units and 64 TAU (Texture Addressing Units), many believed Nvidia initially had plans to make its flagship GeForce 600 series GPU even more powerful. Yet despite that the GeForce GTX 680 remained Nvidia’s fastest single GPU part for almost 12 months. That was of course until February 21st when they announced the GeForce GTX Titan, codenamed GK110. This is the first Nvidia GPU to ever wear the Titan badge, so it must be pretty special right? Well, yes, it is pretty special. The GTX Titan has anywhere from 25% to 50% more resources at its disposal when compared to the GTX 680, and I don’t need to tell you that is pretty amazing stuff. Take the stream processors for example, the 1536 of the GTX 680 now seem a little inadequate when compared to the 2688 of the GTX Titan, a 75% increase. The texture units have also been increased by 75% from 128 to 224, while there are 50% more raster operations going from 32 to 48. Although there are 75% more SPU’s, TAU’s and 50% more ROP’s, there is really only a 50% - 25% increase in performance as the GTX Titan does come clocked lower than the GTX 680. Still, all these extra resources mean that the transistor count has more than doubled from the 3.5 billion of the GTX 680 to a staggering 7.1 billion for the GTX Titan. So how much does this highly complex GPU cost? Given we are expecting to see anywhere from 25% - 50% more performance than the GTX 680 we expected that it would cost at least 50% more, placing it around $700 all things being equal. Unfortunately this isn’t the case, as Nvidia are marketing the GTX Titan as a hyper card designed for extreme gamers with very deep pockets. The MSRP, which has been set at $1000, places the GTX Titan alongside the GTX 690 and at 120% more than the GTX 680 it’s not exactly going to be good value, at least in terms of price vs. performance. With that in mind let’s move on to check out the Gigabyte GeForce GTX Titan in greater detail...

Table of Contents >>> Introduction <<< Gigabyte GTX Titan in Detail Testing Methodology Benchmarks: Battlefield 3, Crysis 3 Benchmarks: Far Cry 3, Max Payne 3 Benchmarks: DiRT 3, Sleeping Dogs Benchmarks: Hitman Absolution, Medal of Honor Overclocking Performance Power Consumption & Temperatures Conclusion Next Page ->

tiger

Posted on: 03/07/2013 12:19 PM Thanks for the great review! Although 1000 bucks for a card is total overkill it is still a bargain considering the full-fledged Tesla chip and knowing comparable workstation cards start at around 3000 or so. Nvidia has truly released the king of gamer's dreams and it's especially impressive how the power consumption stays well in place for such a monster.

ProX	Posted on: 03/07/2013 12:33 PM Great quality review I really enjoyed it. Also thanks for adding frame times now, the more data the better

Trey Long

Posted on: 03/08/2013 02:40 PM SO happy to see frame times included. The fps number in Crossfire, according to some reviewers, may be inflated with runt frames, or slivers that are not actually viewable. This needs to be investigated.

ProX	Posted on: 03/09/2013 06:08 AM @ Trey Long - Yeah well they cannot get away with it anymore now that more sites are including frame times.

Freedom

Posted on: 03/17/2013 02:46 PM First of all thanks for the review. 2 things: 1)Both the Crysis 3 OC performance FPS charts look identical (one resolution is missing): http://www.legionhardware.com/articles_pages/gigabyte_geforce_gtx_titan,8.html 2)Crysis 3 FPS charts look like they are reversed for the two resolutions (better fps values at 1200p compared to the 1600p): http://www.legionhardware.com/articles_pages/gigabyte_geforce_gtx_titan,4.html Thanks again, great job!

Steve Posts: 80 Joined: 2010-02-08

Posted on: 03/17/2013 08:12 PM Thanks for picking up on those mistakes Freedom, they have now been fixed. The comments under the graphs were correct, in a mad dash to get the review done I copy and pasted the wrong graphs. Thanks again.

Freedom

Posted on: 03/17/2013 08:41 PM @Steve, no worries my friend, keep up the good work and thanks again for the review...;)