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

[blastingcap]

Ya I read that section and I don't even remotely agree with that part of the review.

Can you please explain what compute advantage the Titan has exactly for its $1000 price? AT included the ElcomSoft's password cracking. AMD cards would destroy the Titan there in 2 seconds.

"If we look at Wireless Security Auditor, ElcomSoft's most popular tool the situation changes slightly, as a single K20 delivers 85,000 passwords per second, compared to the 65,000 on the GTX 690. Then again, Nvidia still lags behind AMD, as the three year old Radeon HD 5970 handles 103,000 passwords per second, and HD 6990 increased that to 129,000. In that aspect, not even the K20 can reach performance achieved by a single consumer AMD card. This is also the reason why a sea of secy agencies went forward and acquired AMD Radeon HD 5990 and HD 6990 cards, instead of going professional with the Tesla and FirePro cards." ~ Source

Bitcoin mining = fail on NV

OpenCL compute = fail on NV

Double Precision = For $500 Asus Matrix Platinum @ 1300mhz gives you 1.33 Tflops. That's half the price for a similar level of DP.

The only way you can justify the compute advantage here is if you use very specific compute programs that rely on CUDA. If you do and it really matters, you are probably a professional.

Besides RayTracing, the Titan's compute isn't looking so hot:
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/grafikkarten/2013/test-nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan/12/

Ask Ryan Smith. Seriously.

Cherrypicking is easy. BTC mining is due to an instruction reason and MilkyWay@Home etc. for similar reasons.

Yet you didn't mention one of the hugest projects out there, Folding@Home. For that and other such projects, Kepler has the advantage architecturally and no amount of OpenCL can make up for it.

Then there is the CUDA ecosystem NV is trying to build and the support it has today. NV's professional support team is far ahead of AMD, and frankly if I were a business or agency I would think twice about going down the AMD path today--who do I call if my render farm or supercomputer runs into a bug or whatever? NV will be around in one, two, even five years. I guarantee that. AMD is bleeding money and has an uncertain future. To be fair though those guys are buying Teslas, not Titans, anyway.

Even as a nonprofessional, a Tesla Jr., aka Titan may be worthwhile if you already know how to work with CUDA, or you have something that runs better on Kepler architecture or something else. We'll see. I think NV is using this as a sort of experiment, as SirPauly and I were discussing a page or two ago in this thread. If they see this as a viable market, I wouldn't be surprised to see a Titan II, III, IV, etc.

OpenCL driver issues can be fixed, much like how some launches have screwed up SLI or CF drivers that get fixed later on. Does seem like a rush job to launch Titan before the bugs were worked out in OpenCL though.

But I know if I start talking about protein folding and CUDA you will just respond with the same stuff as above and we'll go on for pages so let's just cut to the chase and get Ryan to pop in here.

Ask Ryan Smith.

 

[SolMiester]

Better part of his full conclusion comes closer to the end


Haha, price of this card is a joke and I said this earlier. nvidia has sorely miscalculated here, they are going to lose mindshare trying for this price. The card is simply too slow to be going for a $1000. It needed to be ground breaking for that price.

Good chance we see price drops on this card in a few months. Let the first day buyers get them and then let the dust settle and these cards may be sitting around with no one interested but the few who want 2 or more, probably day 1 buyers. Many will get a 690 or two 680s and ignore this card altogether for the horrible price and performance. You spend a grand to get good performance, there are better options out there for a grand, from AMD and nvidia, with significantly more performance.

Yes, I wonder if they didnt factor a backlash...This could hurt more than help!

 

[boxleitnerb]

The best thing about TITAN? PCPer.com is calling AMD out for cheating with crossfire:

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphi...ance-Review-and-Frame-Rating-Update/Frame-Rat


Yeah, get out and buy your Crossfire system. In the end you have nothing else than a second useless card in the pc.

Those results are horrible. If this is true for other games as well, Crossfire cannot be recommended at all, no matter at what price point and how competitive it is in terms of "Fraps-fps/$". I'm shocked - I mean I expected it to be bad after reading other reviews over the past few years, but this is...speechless.

 

[SolMiester]

Stutter or not, $1k for the Titan as a gaming card is ridiculous. Here's to hoping nv execs know what they're doing here.

As it stands, doesn't look like we'll be recommending Titan to anyone. If it was 180% faster than the 7970 GE, sure. At a measily 120-130%?

Perhaps they really don't have the availability to make it in mass numbers, or else why wouldn't they sell it for $600-700? They probably have such limited numbers they want to squeeze out every possible dime out of these chips.

Speaking of motives, there are a couple of NV focus members but at least they are overt. Those I can tune out. The hard part is figuring out who's on the AMD payroll and sniffing them out.

Haha...yeah, there is certainly a couple here to think twice about and AMD owes them big time!

 

[Face2Face]

Someone do something with this guy's mug. A "haha suckers" meme is in order.

I saw you in the chat room! Good times..

 

[Fx1]

You know, arguing price/perf here isn't the point. Yes, we like to squabble over the prices but we're a small minority. What this sends out to the world is that nv is still the best GPU manufacturer price be damned, and to the majority of the buyer that is more important. Sure, they won't op for the $1000 Titan, but at the $430 range with a 680 and a 7970 GE, NV gains a foothold again. For the big buyers, the industrial/scientific users, price doesn't matter as long as it's within the threshold for pcard purchases. $1000 Titan will easy make the mark for most purchases, and all we care is that it's better than the equivalent AMD offering.

Total fanboy post this is.

How does Nvidia get a foothold with the 680 GTX? That card gets pwned on nearly every game now with the 7970. You dont NEED a GE version either. I have a MSI reference 7970 at 1125/1700 24/7 stable which craps all over the 680 GTX. I could add another for £300 or less now and be 50% faster than Titan!

Just to show you how stupid this card is. I can CF 2x 7970 for £600 at 1125mhz per card. Thats £240 cheaper than Titan and near 50% better performance

 

[Face2Face]

Total fanboy post this is.

How does Nvidia get a foothold with the 680 GTX? That card gets pwned on nearly every game now with the 7970. You dont NEED a GE version either. I have a MSI reference 7970 at 1125/1700 24/7 stable which craps all over the 680 GTX. I could add another for £300 or less now and be 50% faster than Titan!

Just to show you how stupid this card is. I can CF 2x 7970 for £600 at 1125mhz per card for £600. Thats £240 cheaper than Titan and near 50% better performance

Pretty sure Eureka has a GTX 670 and just bought a 7950 WF3. Don't think he is a Fanboy.. well maybe a GPU fanboy..

 

[sontin]

If you need password hacking, you aren't buying an NV card, period.

Sure, because that is such an amazing workload for normal people...

Bitcoin mining = fail on NV
OpenCL compute = fail on NV
Double Precision = For $500 Asus Matrix Platinum @ 1300mhz gives you 1.33 Tflops. That's half the price for a similar level of DP.

Do you know that a GTX680 is beating the 7970GHz in Winzip with OpenCL and Photoshop?

BTW: It's not 1,33TFLOPs. It's much less because AMD can't utilize it at all:

But with TITAN you can go up to 2TFLOPs/s DP - as much as the whole PS4 will have.

And if you compare DP performance of Tahiti XT OC, the Titan is even bigger compute failure for the price than it is in gaming.

Yes, i think so, too. Only twice as fast as the 7970GHz. What a failure. :hmm:

 

[UaVaj]

purchase a pair of 7970 just before new year. was wondering if need to sell and upgrade. not anymore.

give the performance at 5760x1200 - $1000 for ~60% of 7970CF performance = epic fail.



whatever nvidia marketing department is smoking, they need to take a break.
at $600 each. will take two. that is being generous.

 

[RussianSensation]

Yet you didn't mention one of the hugest projects out there, Folding@Home. For that and other such projects, Kepler has the advantage architecturally and no amount of OpenCL can make up for it.

That's a non for profit project. If you are buying Titans for distributed computing DP projects or projects that work faster on NV like F@H, you are either committed to this cause for personal reasons, or are stacked with $. Who goes out and buys a $1000 GPU for F@H otherwise? If you are going to talk about performance in DC projects, then AMD's cards rake up more points in MilkyWay @ Home and things like CollatzConjecture than any NV card has a chance in F@H. So if you are chasing points in leader-boards, once again AMD cards are better. That means you have to be really committed to the F@H cause because it's not going to get you the most points for leader-boards.

I agree with your points about the CUDA eco-system wholeheartedly. If you use apps that take heavy advantage of CUDA, then sure this card is worth its price. How many people of the 1% top PC enthusiasts gamers will care? Another 10% maybe 20%? If NV cared SO much about the 20% of the 1%, why hasn't ANY 500-550mm2 flagship card up to now ship with full DP enabled? It seems to me they are enabling it to further justify the mark-up. This is fair I suppose but it actually hurts PC gamers who would have rather paid $699 for a card without DP. If AMD charged a lot of extra $ for DP, I wouldn't buy their cards either. It was always "free" on their cards which is why it was a bonus feature, not a requirement.

 

[f1sherman]

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphi...ance-Review-and-Frame-Rating-Update/Frame-Rat



Yeah, get out and buy your Crossfire system. In the end you have nothing else than a second useless card in the pc.

wow mind blown...

CF in all its glory:

^^ 2 entire Crossfire frames as measured by FRAPS.
Yes folks that above contributes with 2 frames in your benchmarks.

now compare that with 680 SLI

 

[f1sherman]

dp

 

[blastingcap]

Let me repeat it more clearly this time: Some things are better done on GCN, some on Kepler. Believe it or not, Kepler actually beats GCN sometimes. I gave F@H as just one example. But there are others.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6774/nvidias-geforce-gtx-titan-part-2-titans-performance-unveiled/3

Also, it is not entirely a free feature on AMD 79xx cards because it raises power and thermal envelopes, and at the margins you may have to get a bigger PSU to deal with the higher peak wattage. Even if not, you pay for it via larger die space and wattage. That's a big part of why Pitcairn is more efficient than Tahiti. Personally I would rather have a scaled-up Pitcairn because I don't need DP, but I'd gladly take higher perf/watt. But for most normal users though this is a marginal increase in costs so it's more or less free, I agree.

That's a non for profit project. If you are buying Titans for distributed computing DP projects or projects that work faster on NV like F@H, you are either committed to this cause for personal reasons, or are stacked with $. Who goes out and buys a $1000 GPU for F@H otherwise? If you are going to talk about performance in DC projects, then AMD's cards rake up more points in MilkyWay @ Home and things like CollatzConjecture than any NV card has a chance in F@H. So if you are chasing points in leader-boards, once again AMD cards are better. That means you have to be really committed to the F@H cause because it's not going to get you the most points for leader-boards.

I agree with your points about the CUDA eco-system wholeheartedly. If you use apps that take heavy advantage of CUDA, then sure this card is worth its price. How many people of the 1% top PC enthusiasts gamers will care? Another 10% maybe 20%? If NV cared SO much about the 20% of the 1%, why hasn't ANY 500-550mm2 flagship card up to now ship with full DP enabled? It seems to me they are enabling it to further justify the mark-up. This is fair I suppose but it actually hurts PC gamers who would have rather paid $699 for a card without DP. If AMD charged a lot of extra $ for DP, I wouldn't buy their cards either. It was always "free" on their cards which is why it was a bonus feature, not a requirement.

 

[RussianSensation]

Do you know that a GTX680 is beating the 7970GHz in Winzip with OpenCL and Photoshop?

Where is the Titan on that chart compared to the 680?

BTW: It's not 1,33TFLOPs. It's much less because AMD can't utilize it at all:[/img]

You mean in that program it can't tap full DP? The program you listed isn't indicative of the entire potential of HD7970 or Titan in terms of DP.

Did you even bother looking at all these other benches?
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/grafikkarten/2013/test-nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan/13/

http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/grafikkarten/2013/test-nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan/12/

What's there to expect from a guy that defends NV 24/7 every generation. You are like wreckage re-incarnated.

Yes, i think so, too. Only twice as fast as the 7970GHz. What a failure. :hmm:

Ya, let us know what you can use that program for and how many people on our boards use it. If there are 1,000 guys in Silicon Valley that might want Titan's DP advantage in 1 program by saving $ not getting Teslas, it just meant that 10,000 PC gamers got bent over for that. Brilliant.

If you made a poll on our forum and asked people if they would have wanted a $650-699 Titan with 3GB of VRAM and 1/24th DP instead of $1K 6GB of VRAM 1/3 DP Titan, I am sure the vote would be something like 80% to 20%, if not worse. NV tacked on a bunch of gimmicky features gamers don't care about and priced this card at $1000.

NV aimed this card straight at boutique PC builders, the type of people who drive Porsche 911s and live in $2 million homes. That's who the Titan is aimed at imo.

Let me repeat it more clearly this time: Some things are better done on GCN, some on Kepler. Believe it or not, Kepler actually beats GCN sometimes. I gave F@H as just one example. But there are others.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6774/nvidias-geforce-gtx-titan-part-2-titans-performance-unveiled/3
.

I never said it doesn't beat it in some apps. Did you read the details of the compute apps they tested on there? University/scientific research.

"EMM (measures performance of dense matrix multiplication) and FFT (Fast Fourier Transform). These numerical operations are important in a variety of scientific fields"

If you are a university, you get thousands of dollars research grants. For those people if the Titan costs $1K or $2K doesn't matter. So what you are saying is NV's price is justified because they prioritized universities, corporations that are interested in research, etc. when they set the pricing on the Titan and said screw gamers? Ya, I get that in some Compute tasks the Titan is a monster but in the context of gamers, it seems NV told them to screw themselves because they could care less about any of these features. Essentially the PC gamers are paying a $350 "workstation pricing premium" for features they will never use. How nice of NV to be so generous.

^^ 2 entire Crossfire frames as measured by FRAPS.
Yes folks that above contributes with 2 frames in your benchmarks.

That would be pretty funny if for 5+ years of CF testing, the reviewers who tested CF couldn't tell the difference between 50 fps and 100 fps and those extra 50 fps were just fake.

 

[Imouto]

BTW: It's not 1,33TFLOPs. It's much less because AMD can't utilize it at all:

But with TITAN you can go up to 2TFLOPs/s DP - as much as the whole PS4 will have.

Wait. What?

 

[blastingcap]

The best thing about TITAN? PCPer.com is calling AMD out for cheating with crossfire:

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphi...ance-Review-and-Frame-Rating-Update/Frame-Rat


Yeah, get out and buy your Crossfire system. In the end you have nothing else than a second useless card in the pc.

Thank goodness some people are actually trying to measure end-user experiences better, like those at TechReport and PCPer with high-speed cameras and digital capture cards. Ryan Smith are you listening?????

 

[Silverforce11]

I thought the 7970 and 680 was overpriced ages ago since release. An OC 7950 with a good cooler is still unmatched for gaming value, and now, this $999 card comes along with ~20-30% average improvement of a 7970Ghz, for what, nearly 160% ($999/$380) the cost? Can't believe the amount of stupid on here who even defends this, they are clearly not interested in value for gamers.

I wonder if some of the forum defenders of this overpriced product would actually pay out of their pocket to buy one..

Its funny they would never buy it, but worship it like its the next coming.

Honestly, its a great GPU, so many good points, only completely trashed by the pricing. I blasted both 7970/680 for being a rip-off, this is so much worse.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Thank goodness some people are actually trying to measure end-user experiences better, like those at TechReport and PCPer with high-speed cameras and digital capture cards. Ryan Smith are you listening?????

Don't worry guys, you can always CF for less and get moar cores.

Sadly value doesn't replace performance in any situation for people who actually need the performance.

There is no amount of money you can throw at AMD to get results possible with Nvidia.

As far as you completely avoiding the issue of MS in single, and MGPU solutions for AMD... Well honestly it's what I'd expect from someone who works for AMD, not from an impartial forum user.

He's just totally ignoring the issue like the AMD PR guy did with Titan. They must have gotten the same memo! :hmm:

 

[Silverforce11]

Thank goodness some people are actually trying to measure end-user experiences better, like those at TechReport and PCPer with high-speed cameras and digital capture cards. Ryan Smith are you listening?????

Go one step further and do blind testing with a large sample size of the population and see if ppl even notice these minor frame time latencies. Until you can say X% of ppl are annoyed by it etc, you can't say much more than: IF MS bothers you.. blah blah.

For all the forum RAGE against AMD's MS woes.. storm in a teacup. Heck, Radeonpro smooths frame latencies on AMD cards to become "smoother" than NV. Free program with a nice onscreen monitor, takes a few minutes to setup n leave it on auto.

 

[DooKey]

snip

NV aimed this card straight at boutique PC builders, the type of people who drive Porsche 911s and live in $2 million homes. That's who the Titan is aimed at imo.

I think you're off a bit on this one. The Titan isn't made for millionaires. The Titan is for hardcore PC lovers that have a decent amount of disposable income and like to get really nice stuff. When you think about it $1000 isn't a tremendous amount of money. Many people spend this much on their LCD big screen or a new rifle with spare mags and some ammo. Lots of people spend far more than this to go on a vacation for a week to the islands. People in this category aren't even close to your description of the Titan target. The Titan is a low-end luxury item, nothing more, nothing less.

 

[blastingcap]

Go one step further and do blind testing with a large sample size of the population and see if ppl even notice these minor frame time latencies. Until you can say X% of ppl are annoyed by it etc, you can't say much more than: IF MS bothers you.. blah blah.

This is an idea I would support as well... HardOCP already does this but with a small sample of the population (of like 1-2 people). Anything like this or TR/PCPer testing is better than the lame Anandtech graphs we currently have.

I think you're off a bit on this one. The Titan isn't made for millionaires. The Titan is for hardcore PC lovers that have a decent amount of disposable income and like to get really nice stuff. When you think about it $1000 isn't a tremendous amount of money. Many people spend this much on their LCD big screen or a new rifle with spare mags and some ammo. Lots of people spend far more than this to go on a vacation for a week to the islands. People in this category aren't even close to your description of the Titan target. The Titan is a low-end luxury item, nothing more, nothing less.

Yeah, I would agree that it's not targeted for the top 1% income bracket... maybe more like the 10%. There have been single visits to the range where I spent more than on a midrange video card (on range fees, targets, and ammo--I bring my own eye/ear protection and firearms).

Essentially the PC gamers are paying a $350 "workstation pricing premium" for features they will never use. How nice of NV to be so generous.

Frankly I think the shine is off the desktop gaming business. It's a dying market what with consoles and tablets and smartphone and other casual gaming and Ouya and other stuff coming in, not to mention competition from other forms of entertainment (movies, books, TV, radio). It's a lower-margin business necessary to sustain the volumes necessary to get enough scale going to make Tesla/Quadro work and to live on while Tegra gets developed more. I think NV's attitude is that they are okay selling Titan as a niche product geared towards those who want it for Compute... but if some rich gamers want to tag along with the Compute crowd, they can get a sneak peek at Maxwell by buying a Titan today. But NV certainly isn't going to lower the price of Titan just for gamers. They already have other parts down the stack for the masses (GTX 6xx).

 

[Deltaechoe]

Ask Ryan Smith. Seriously.

Cherrypicking is easy. BTC mining is due to an instruction reason and MilkyWay@Home etc. for similar reasons.

Yet you didn't mention one of the hugest projects out there, Folding@Home. For that and other such projects, Kepler has the advantage architecturally and no amount of OpenCL can make up for it.

Then there is the CUDA ecosystem NV is trying to build and the support it has today. NV's professional support team is far ahead of AMD, and frankly if I were a business or agency I would think twice about going down the AMD path today--who do I call if my render farm or supercomputer runs into a bug or whatever? NV will be around in one, two, even five years. I guarantee that. AMD is bleeding money and has an uncertain future. To be fair though those guys are buying Teslas, not Titans, anyway.

Even as a nonprofessional, a Tesla Jr., aka Titan may be worthwhile if you already know how to work with CUDA, or you have something that runs better on Kepler architecture or something else. We'll see. I think NV is using this as a sort of experiment, as SirPauly and I were discussing a page or two ago in this thread. If they see this as a viable market, I wouldn't be surprised to see a Titan II, III, IV, etc.

OpenCL driver issues can be fixed, much like how some launches have screwed up SLI or CF drivers that get fixed later on. Does seem like a rush job to launch Titan before the bugs were worked out in OpenCL though.

But I know if I start talking about protein folding and CUDA you will just respond with the same stuff as above and we'll go on for pages so let's just cut to the chase and get Ryan to pop in here.

Ask Ryan Smith.

Well put buddy, it's nice to see someone understands how compute optimizations work

 

[sontin]

wow mind blown...

CF in all its glory:

^^ 2 entire Crossfire frames as measured by FRAPS.
Yes folks that above contributes with 2 frames in your benchmarks.

Actually - that are 3 frames. :|

Fun part is that even the single 7970GHz showing less Frames with the Frame Rating Capture by PCPer.com. So we should wait for the whole report but it looks that AMD is boosting the FPS with a few extra useless frames...

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Actually - that are 3 frames. :|

Fun part is that even the single 7970GHz showing less Frames with the Frame Rating Capture by PCPer.com. So we should full the whole report but it looks that AMD is boosting the frames with a few extra useless frames...

:awe:

Yeah but if 750 out of 1000 people can't tell the difference between fake frames and real frames what does it matter, or 30 fps vs 60 fps, why should we care?

 

[RussianSensation]

Am I the only one appalled at the overclocking limits of that card? For that price it's ridiculous. NV wants us to think it's a LUXURY product yet they skimp on power circuitry? This is pathetic!

I think the problem is the 6+2 power phases. It's only 2 more than a GTX680.

For a card that costs $1000, you'd think the PCB / components on the Titan would look like the GTX680 Lightning. I wonder why NV didn't price this at $1,500? They probably should have. Apparently there is a huge demand from hardcore PC gamers for full DP performance all of a sudden and wait for it actual compute performance after the same people suggested it was great this was cut off from GK104 to make it more lean. At least the people who said GK104 was a great lean gaming card are sticking to their guns are saying how worthless the DP is for gamers. They are being consistent, just flip-flopping Romnies defending any move NV makes to justify prices. :biggrin:

Can't believe the amount of stupid on here who even defends this, they are clearly not interested in value for gamers. Honestly, its a great GPU, so many good points, only completely trashed by the pricing. I blasted both 7970/680 for being a rip-off, this is so much worse.

All I got out of this that when AMD raises prices, all hell breaks lose. When NV does it, there are 100+ reasons why it's justified (DP, compute, 6GB of VRAM, SLI scaling, etc). Also, apparently there is an army of loyal NV users who are willing to pay $1000 for a Titan GPU. What surprises me now is why did NV even bother keeping GTX480/580 at $500. Sounds like they could have sold those cards at $700.

Oh well, the price/performance conscious PC upgrades will skip this overpriced card and wait for 20nm for a reasonable jump in price/performance. The early adopters who want the fastest GPU have their chance to dominate benchmark scores for at least 12 months with 3 of these cards watercooled. Too bad if these cards sell well, it basically means NV will establish a new price level for flagship 500mm2+ cards at the $800+ mark.

Frankly I think the shine is off the desktop gaming business. But NV certainly isn't going to lower the price of Titan just for gamers. They already have other parts down the stack for the masses (GTX 6xx).

Ya, I know what you mean. I don't really care so much if NV prices a flagship card at $1K once, or twice, but if this is a general trend, that may suggest that 280-300mm2 GPUs like GK104 will start to cost us $500 from now on. I was hoping this was just the exception, not the rule but it seems AMD and NV are going to be raising ASP on us and passing on the extra costs to get down to lower nodes. I suppose that means PC gaming will get more expensive for PC enthusiasts or we'd have to settle for slower increases in performance at similar price levels (i.e., just have to wait a little longer to upgrade).