Nvidia’s Titan arrives to take the performance crown – the Preview
(Pre) Conclusion
Here are a couple of points not yet covered:
Titan Availability
The Nvidia GTX Titan is shipping on the 21st of February and will also be available for order from leading OEMs. At the Nvidia press meeting, it was made clear that Titan’s launch would not be limited to 10,000 cards. It was also noted that Nvidia’s partners would supply Titans by region – ASUS and EVGA would supply North America.
The Future of the GTX 690
Here is a direct quote from Nvidia:
GeForce GTX TITAN will coexist with GeForce GTX 690 at the top of our product stack. We will not be ending GeForce GTX 690 production. We feel the two cards complement each other well; GeForce GTX 690 is the ultimate graphics card for today’s games if all you plan to do is drive a single high-end 27″ or 30″ panel. For these users, there’s nothing else like GTX 690. However, with its bigger frame buffer and 384-bit memory interface, GeForce GTX TITAN is better suited for Surround gaming with multiple monitors. In addition, GeForce GTX TITAN is compatible with a wider variety of system cases thanks to its reduced power requirements and shorter board length. GTX TITAN also runs quieter and exhausts hot air outside your system chassis.
This has been quite an enjoyable, if far too short, 1-day preview for us in evaluating our new GTX Titan since it arrived on Monday (this week). We have it running benchmarks right now and we will have a full 30-game evaluation for you on Thursday morning.
Titan looks impressive. However, the big question is what does it bring over the similarly priced GTX 690 and is it “worth” $1000. These and many questions we shall attempt to cover in Part Two.
Don’t forget to check ABT forums! Our tech discussions are becoming among the best to be found anywhere! You can still give us input regarding the upcoming evaluations.
Happy Gaming!
Mark Poppin
ABT Senior Editor
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holy geeeez
Hi there, first of all thank you for a great site. I love your extended benchmark suite, it’s so great to see a site not use the same few games again and again. I have a few things though, that I’m missing.
1) It would be nice if you could take a screenshot of the image settings in the Catalyst and nvidia control panel. There are just so many settings, and I’m not quite sure how to interpret what you write.
2) Looking at your previous “The war of the WHQL” article, I was missing an easy way to compare the overall performance. Something like a performance index with and without AA would be great. And perhaps highlight the highest score in the table
3) I’m not sure what the most normal/popular clock speed of the 680 and 7970 is, but since few people buy reference cards, I think you should use a clock speed that more closely resembles what people get when they buy an Asus, MSI or Sapphire card and so on. The performance difference is quite large between the slowest and fastest Asus 670 for instance. The TOP model (which I think is the most popular one), has a GPU Boost Clock of 1137 MHz and a GPU Base Clock of 1058 MHz, compared to a GPU Boost Clock of 980 MHz and a GPU Base Clock of 915 MHz. In benchmarks the fastest model is a lot faster, there is really a big difference but many don’t seem to pay any attention to it. Also your 7970 is listed as overclocked? I’m not sure what the most popular speed of a 7970 is again, but it just caught my eye.
4) Don’t stop testing for smoothness
Thank-you for your comments.
1) As to the control panels, they are set to default (“use application settings”) except that Nvidia’s has power limitations removed, High Quality is used instead of Quality and Vsync is off. In the AMD CP, High Quality is used instead of quality, surface and other optimizations including tessellation are OFF (application settings override CP setting)
2) We almost never bench without AA. We do highlight the highest scores when we are only looking at two sets of drivers to see the performance changes. We don’t usually do it when we are comparing 4 sets of drivers (2-AMD and 2-Nvidia)
3) We use the reference clocks for a GTX 680 and the reference clocks for a HD 7970 at GHz speeds (with the boost locked on)
4) We are resuming frame time benching this week
You might consider joining ABT forum. We’d love to have your input there!