***Official Reviews Thread*** Nvidia Geforce GTX Titan - Launched Feb. 21, 2013

[Souv]

Which ones ?



Say what? AMD has superior price/performance and performance at nearly every level up to $600 on the desktop at regular prices, not sales. Sure they are occasional sales of GTX670 at $300 or GTX660 dipping to $185-190 but on average what does NV have worth buying from $100 to $600? I am curious. And if you are into overclocking, frankly HD7950 MSI TF3 or similar obsoletes everything AMD/or NV has from $300 to $600. :biggrin:

you are absolutely right.....here's benchmark 7950 Crossfire vs 680 SLI at 5760*1080 (Eyefinity/Surround)

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18455827

(don't go for nv market hype....it's hype and show-offs with greater fan base....but actually way overpriced and less performing ...hell even 650 ti sells at 7850 price ....and blind nvI nerds still buy it huhahaha :awe:what a joke:awe:also look at market naming convention-"TITAN".....WOOOO.....BUT MY TITAN NAMING CONVENTION IS "1000$ BULLSHIT" OR "TITAN MY ASS":whiste::whiste::biggrin::biggrin::biggrin::whiste:

 

[Grooveriding]

They also didn't charge $500 for an 8800GT and strip it of features.

:thumbsup: This is basically the analogy for what they did with the 680.

Also the 8800GTX was $649, not $1000...

 

[RussianSensation]

I am not seeing any of this.. Maybe it's on my end.

Just go here. The entire review is there.

One thing is for sure, 20nm ~300mm^2 chips are going to have some memory bandwidth issues to overcome if they want to come close to or pass gk110 in performance.

HD7970GE already has the same bandwidth as the Titan on 28nm. I don't understand why a 20nm 300mm2 chip won't be able to exceed the bandwidth of 288GB/sec when we'll have faster memory. Also, I don't see AMD building a 300mm2 HD8970 chip on 20nm. It's probably going to be closer to 400mm2 like Tahiti XT and Cayman XT were.

 

[badb0y]

$1000 for a ~35% performance increase?

Seriously, the card's performance, construction, and presentation are very good but for $1000....I was expecting at least a 45% performance advantage on average over GTX 680/HD 7970 Ghz.

 

[Lepton87]

A luxury product that's under-engineered and can't be properly overclocked. I'm extremely disappointed, I expected 30% OC headroom. You can match this card with a good 7970 (over 1300MHz).

 

[RussianSensation]

Alatar over at OCN put it best:

"Nvidia actually wants to price their big dies (500mm^2+) higher than $500. This is because they're very expensive, have a lot of R&D money put into them and have low yields."

People wouldn't have minded $649 or $699. If NV wanted people to get used to $1K flagship GPUs, wouldn't it have been better to gradually raise the price? Didn't NV learn at all from AMD raising the price from $369 to $549 in 1 generation and how the market reacted? Now NV thinks they can go from $499 480/580/680 to $1000 in 1 shot? Not just that but 2013 is riddled with mostly console ported games. It's not the smartest period in PC gaming to charge $1000 for 500mm2+ GPUs because it's not as if games like Bioshock Infinite, Starcraft 2, Company of Heroes 2 would need this type of GPU power. Most people won't upgrade for Crysis 3 alone since Titan can't even max that! GTA V, BF4 and Metro LL don't even have a release date yet.

Alatar over at OCN put it best:

What made the 480 and 580 cost $500 then? Competition.

GTX280/480/580 all charged way lower premiums for each 1% increase in performance over AMD cards. NV DOUBLED the price premium for each 1% increase in performance the Titan has over HD7970GE that it charged for 480/580 over 5870/6970. Even GTX280's price premium wasn't this bad. If NV maintained $7-8 price premium / 1% increase in performance 480/580 had over $369 5870/6970 cards, the Titan should be about $700 over the $430 1100mhz 7970. NV is charging that much not because of competition but because they tested the market with a nice price level and saw people paying $1000 for a GTX690 for almost a full year. Even if AMD dropped 7970 to $299 tomorrow, NV would keep the Titan at $1000 and justify it as a single-GPU replacement for the 690. NV's brand positioning is now moving closer and closer to Apple in terms of both marketing its products and perception. They essentially took a 550mm2 "real" GTX680, added on some nice metal heatsinks and charged $1K for it. Sure it looks stunning on the outside but underneath it's still a $649 550mm2 GPU.

Imho,

Let's say they did release Titan at 599 -- it would cannibalize sales for their existing sku's one may imagine. By pricing it at 999 allows Gk-104 and possibly GK-114 sku's to retain their enthusiast price-points.

Why is the 680 still selling for $450 when 1Ghz 7970's are going for $380? NV's prices have not been in-line with AMD's for about 6 months now. It seems consumers are willing to pay more for slower NV cards and that's the end of it. NV caught on to this since they saw GTX600 still outselling HD7000 despite being slower. Now they think they are Apple and can just start attaching even larger premiums thinking their customer base will keep paying for the brand name. GTX690 sold well, so NV will just keep going. The only thing that can change is consumers stop paying these prices or AMD launches faster HD7970GE which isn't possible since they confirmed it's their fastest on the desktop for all of 2013.

 

[hjalti8]

Bottom line, don't expect much higher overclocking than what other reviewers have already obtained. The power % limit will prevent that.

and since the titan is just as mem-bandwidth starved as the 660ti it will not gain much going above 1ghz on the core without some insane memory overclock.
the titan should have had fewer cuda cores and a 512bit memory bus

 

[SirPauly]

They also didn't charge $500 for an 8800GT and strip it of features.

The 499 dollar GTX 680 offered more performance and efficiency than a 549 dollar HD 7970!

 

[The Alias]

drives the point home even more on another note I can't wait for the memory rewrite

 

[Termie]

I already see some discussion of how an OC'd 7970 will beat the Titan. Has anyone yet seen a review comparing a max air overclocked 7970 (@~1250) to a max overclocked Titan (@~1100). I think that could be a very interesting comparison, as the Titan doesn't have quite the same OC headroom as the 7970 (but it's not nearly as bad as many people above are making it out to be).

The best I could do is compare a TPU 7970 review from November to today's Titan review:

GTX Titan@~1150/1755

Source: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_Titan/33.html

HD7970@1265/1735:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/HIS/HD_7970_X_Turbo/31.html

While the 7970 test was done in November, you can tell that the drivers haven't improved enough to make the benchmark's conclusions invalid. I think we can therefore conclude that in BF3, which is fairly representative and now fairly evenly balanced between AMD and Nvidia, the Titan performs 30% faster at max overclock.

 

[AnandThenMan]

Imho,

Let's say they did release Titan at 599 -- it would cannibalize sales for their existing sku's one may imagine. By pricing it at 999 allows Gk-104 and possibly GK-114 sku's to retain their enthusiast price-points.

Yay for defending premiums!

This is a very nice piece of hardware (although I HATE the name) but the price is pure thievery. I don't understand what Nvidia thinks they are doing here, there is charging a premium price for a premium product, but this price point is a kick in the crotch to their loyal customers. Defending said price premium is laughable, especially when the same people went on a year+ long diatribe against AMD's comparatively mild price bumps.

 

[SirPauly]

:thumbsup: This is basically the analogy for what they did with the 680.

Also the 8800GTX was $649, not $1000...

But the 8800 ultra had around an 829 MSRP and look at the slim difference compared to the 8800 GTX which had around an 599 MSRP.

http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/grafikkarten/2007/test-nvidia-geforce-8800-ultra/24/

Did nVidia lose mindshare?

 

[AnandThenMan]

More defending of rip-off prices. Flawless hypocrisy. :hmm:

But the 8800 ultra had around an 829 MSRP and look at the slim difference compared to the 8800 GTX which had around an 599 MSRP.

http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/grafikkarten/2007/test-nvidia-geforce-8800-ultra/24/

Did nVidia lose mindshare?

 

[Elfear]

Imho,

Let's say they did release Titan at 599 -- it would cannibalize sales for their existing sku's one may imagine. By pricing it at 999 allows Gk-104 and possibly GK-114 sku's to retain their enthusiast price-points.

I assume he means dumb for consumers. From Nvidia shareholder's standpoint the Titan is priced very well.

In terms of performance increase over last gen products, doesn't Titan fall somewhat short of what we've seen from Nvidia in the past? IMO we can consider Titan a refresh of Kepler since it came out a year later on the same node much like the GeForce 500 series (although it was only 8 months later than the 400 series). If GK104 is the successor to GF114 than the comparison of Titan to GTX 680 would be the same as GTX 580 to GTX 460 (i.e. mid-range first gen vs. refresh high-end).

The GTX 580 is ~90-95% faster than the GTX 460 according to TPU and Computerbase (you'll have to use HD 7770 numbers from the CB charts since it's very close to the same performance as the GTX 460).

TPU

CB

The Titan though is only 29-35% faster on average than the the GTX 680 based on benchmarks from the same sites. So 90-95% vs 29-35%.

Am I thinking about that right?

 

[SirPauly]

Yay for defending premiums!

This is a very nice piece of hardware (although I HATE the name) but the price is pure thievery. I don't understand what Nvidia thinks they are doing here, there is charging a premium price for a premium product, but this price point is a kick in the crotch to their loyal customers. Defending said price premium is laughable, especially when the same people went on a year+ long diatribe against AMD's comparatively mild price bumps.

Actually said the same exact thing both times:

Examples of evolutionary and incremental price performance on substantial and significant node and arches.

When companies have a competitive advantage or opportunity at times their predator fangs devour value.

50 percent jump in MSRP from AMD

Stratospheric jump in MSRP from nVidia.

There was a reason why I was vocal and consistent-- this isn't surprising.

Understanding why is not the same as defending or whining!

 

[DooKey]

More defending of rip-off prices. Flawless hypocrisy. :hmm:

The market will judge whether the price is a rip-off or not. Just as it judged AMD who reached too far with their initial launch price of the 7970 and have had to significantly cut prices. I say this as the buyer of two XFX DD 7970s on launch day.

I'm in no big hurry to get a couple of Titans so I'm going to wait it out a few weeks to see what happens.

 

[blastingcap]

People wouldn't have minded $649 or $699. If NV wanted people to get used to $1K flagship GPUs, wouldn't it have been better to gradually raise the price? Didn't NV learn at all from AMD raising the price from $369 to $549 in 1 generation and how the market reacted? Now NV thinks they can go from $499 480/580/680 to $1000 in 1 shot? Not just that but 2013 is riddled with mostly console ported games. It's not the smartest period in PC gaming to charge $1000 for 500mm2+ GPUs because it's not as if games like Bioshock Infinite, Starcraft 2, Company of Heroes 2 would need this type of GPU power. Most people won't upgrade for Crysis 3 alone since Titan can't even max that! GTA V, BF4 and Metro LL don't even have a release date yet.

GTX280/480/580 all charged way lower premiums for each 1% increase in performance over AMD cards. NV DOUBLED the price premium for each 1% increase in performance the Titan has over HD7970GE that it charged for 480/580 over 5870/6970. Even GTX280's price premium wasn't this bad. If NV maintained $7-8 price premium / 1% increase in performance 480/580 had over $369 5870/6970 cards, the Titan should be about $700 over the $430 1100mhz 7970. NV is charging that much not because of competition but because they tested the market with a nice price level and saw people paying $1000 for a GTX690 for almost a full year. Even if AMD dropped 7970 to $299 tomorrow, NV would keep the Titan at $1000 and justify it as a single-GPU replacement for the 690. NV's brand positioning is now moving closer and closer to Apple in terms of both marketing its products and perception. They essentially took a 550mm2 "real" GTX680, added on some nice metal heatsinks and charged $1K for it. Sure it looks stunning on the outside but underneath it's still a $649 550mm2 GPU.

Why is the 680 still selling for $450 when 1Ghz 7970's are going for $380? NV's prices have not been in-line with AMD's for about 6 months now. It seems consumers are willing to pay more for slower NV cards and that's the end of it. NV caught on to this since they saw GTX600 still outselling HD7000 despite being slower. Now they think they are Apple and can just start attaching even larger premiums thinking their customer base will keep paying for the brand name. GTX690 sold well, so NV will just keep going. The only thing that can change is consumers stop paying these prices or AMD launches faster HD7970GE which isn't possible since they confirmed it's their fastest on the desktop for all of 2013.

There is a big difference; as Anandtech's review put it in the last paragraph:

"None of this of course accounts for compute. Simply put, Titan stands alone in the compute world. As the first consumer GK110 GPU based video card there’s nothing quite like it. We’ll see why that is in our look at compute performance, but as far as the competitive landscape is concerned there’s not a lot to discuss here."

All previous GeForces were crippled in DP, but not Titan. Titan has a couple of other things taken out that makes it hard for large-scale compute, but there are people in labs out there who want Titan for small-scale compute, not gaming, and perhaps $1k is a compromise because NV doesn't want to sabotage their pro card business too much.

And come on, don't pretend you don't know why GTX 680s still cost so much. I stated the obvious many times over the last several months: GTX 680 will not go down nearly as much in price as GTX 670 because why sell an uncut GK104 chip for so little when you can sell it in a pro card for so much more? Gamers can get the reject chips. That's why I said GTX 670 had so much more room to move price-wise.

 

[Grooveriding]

I agree, about the only people who would defend this level of thievery would be nvidia shareholders clinging to a wild hope that enough people will buy this massively overpriced and under-delivering per said massive price, video card.

 

[f1sherman]

TR review is up

http://techreport.com/review/24381/nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan-reviewed

 

[VulgarDisplay]

There is a big difference; as Anandtech's review put it in the last paragraph:

"None of this of course accounts for compute. Simply put, Titan stands alone in the compute world. As the first consumer GK110 GPU based video card there’s nothing quite like it. We’ll see why that is in our look at compute performance, but as far as the competitive landscape is concerned there’s not a lot to discuss here."

All previous GeForces were crippled in DP, but not Titan. Titan has a couple of other things taken out that makes it hard for large-scale compute, but there are people in labs out there who want Titan for small-scale compute, not gaming, and perhaps $1k is a compromise because NV doesn't want to sabotage their pro card business too much.

And come on, don't pretend you don't know why GTX 680s still cost so much. I stated the obvious many times over the last several months: GTX 680 will not go down nearly as much in price as GTX 670 because why sell an uncut GK104 chip for so little when you can sell it in a pro card for so much more? Gamers can get the reject chips. That's why I said GTX 670 had so much more room to move price-wise.

This has me laughing at Anandtech's review hysterically. Titan stands alone in the compute benchmarks when the 7970GE isn't included. ROFL.

Yes it's faster than the nvidia cards included, but it looks ridiculously bad for the price when the benchmark includes the 7970GE.

 

[Elfear]

I already see some discussion of how an OC'd 7970 will beat the Titan. Has anyone yet seen a review comparing a max air overclocked 7970 (@~1250) to a max overclocked Titan (@~1100). I think that could be a very interesting comparison, as the Titan doesn't have quite the same OC headroom as the 7970 (but it's not nearly as bad as many people above are making it out to be).

The best I could do is compare a TPU 7970 review from November to today's Titan review:

GTX Titan@~1150/1755
Source: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_Titan/33.html

HD7970@1265/1735:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/HIS/HD_7970_X_Turbo/31.html

While the 7970 test was done in November, you can tell that the drivers haven't improved enough to make the benchmark's conclusions invalid. I think we can therefore conclude that in BF3, which is fairly representative and now fairly evenly balanced between AMD and Nvidia, the Titan performs 30% faster at max overclock.

For BF3 you'd be right but if you look at an average of games it will be more in the 7970's favor. Titan is ~22-30% faster on average depending on the review site. In the BF3 example you posted, Titan gained 21% more performance from overclocking while the 7970 gained 25%. So strictly from those numbers a Titan@1150/1755 will be ~18-26% faster than a 7970Ghz@1265/1735.

We'll have to see what the Titan is capable of in the coming weeks because we already know some aftermarket 7970s can do 1300MHz+ on air.

 

[Lonbjerg]

Funny...the worlds fastet GPU comes out a 551mm² on 28 nm...and all the AMD fanboys can do?
Whine over the price.

At least they are consistant...

 

[SirPauly]

Why is the 680 still selling for $450 when 1Ghz 7970's are going for $380?

Imho,

Name brand which may encompass factors from their name brand recognition and loyalty, features that offer differentiation to software considerations.

The market is what the market is!

 

[chimaxi83]

Funny...the worlds fastet GPU comes out a 551mm² on 28 nm...and all the AMD fanboys can do?
Whine over the price.

At least they are consistant...

Maybe one of these days you'll post something useful here

I see almost everyone on here mentioning that the price is too high/extreme, not just "AMD fanboys", including Nvidia owners like me.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

Funny...the worlds fastet GPU comes out a 551mm² on 28 nm...and all the AMD fanboys can do?
Whine over the price.

At least they are consistant...

I am not an AMD fanboy, and I'm not whining.

This card is plain and simple a joke in terms of price/performance. I'm sure many gtx680 owners will gladly agree with me.

Someone better at math than me could prove me wrong, but we got 20-30% more performance over the Tahiti with 41% more die space. An engineering MARVEL.

I will reiterate, I suck at math.