Gadgetory

large format high-res monitors this is the 30-inch monitor that we used to get our 2560 by 1600 or 1600 pieper formance results you can consider these pretty close to what you'd get if you ran at 2560 by 1440 the difference actually isn't all that much and we are all about the geforce gtx titan today this is the fastest single GPU card BarNone so what that means is compared to dual GPU solutions such as the 660ti sli that we also ran and the Asus Ares 2 which we also ran which basically amounts to 270 970 gigahertz edition cards you will get consistently good performance so somewhere between a single GPU and two GPUs because those ones rely on driver optimizations one of the other things that's interesting about Titan from a large format and high resolution perspective is the fact that it has six gigs of GPU memory which means not only will one Titan perform extremely well at high res but several titans will perform extremely well at high res Titan seeks to do a few things keep acoustics low keep temperatures reasonable deliver outstanding performance and do it all with one GPU and reasonable power consumption so we're going to be analyzing some of those other things in other videos and this video is focused on the performance at greater than 1080p resolution now I did a full 1080p review as well and there's a 57 60 by 1080 surround review as well so let's have a look at Crysis so crisis was always a challenge this is Crysis 1 by the way no Crysis 2 and it continues to be a challenge so that our single GPU card however it runs at almost 60 FPS average in Crysis one at 2560 by 1600 crisis has officially been conquered this is at DirectX 10 very high presets eight times NSAA with motion blur off the only thing that beats the Titan in Crysis is the Aries - so that's the dual 7970 solution and you see that the Titan actually performs almost twice as well as a GTX 680 part of this could be due to the fact that it has a much larger frame buffer although I doubt it because Christ has only used up about one gig of VRAM whereas the rest of it is probably due to the fact that it has about 2.6 rather 7.1 billion transistors with 2600 CUDA cores so moving right along yeah Titan performs pretty well but it's about the same as gtx 660 sli which starts to look like a pretty good value here this is an example of how well optimised sli scaling and games that don't demand too much in terms of video memory can perform really well compared to the titan at a lower price crysis 3 was just released so this one is a very very interesting case study you can see here the aries 2 demonstrates why sometimes dual GPU solutions are not the answer the titan tops the performance charts beating out the 660ti sli solution but not by much destroying the gtx 680 again performing almost dumb well not quite almost double but 75% better than a gtx 680 with the ares two actually coming in behind a single 7970 now the reason for that can be any number of things the aries ii uses a special driver because it's not a standard AMD card so a soos has their own driver so sometimes that can be a little bit behind in terms of optimization it could be crossfire profiles I've seen online that people are finding better success with you know using random crossfire profiles but we were using the default ones and yeah so sometimes a dual GPU solution can perform the same as a single one or even worse which is one of the reasons why I personally always recommend a single GPU solution when you can however when you look at the performance in this game 660ti looks like a pretty good value considering it performs ninety percent as well as a Titan but actually costs about sixty-five percent as much and you can also get 660ti Zin 3 gig configurations far cry 3 another high performance title another high resolution result here so the Ares two and 660ti sli come out way ahead on any of the single GPU solutions probably the most impressive thing on this put on this particular chart right here I think slicks waiting for a video card here have a 7970 is the 7970 that I just handed slick the 7970 beats the GTX 680 by almost 30% only losing to the only other single GPU card in our test which is the Titan and that was only by about 20% so it takes a dual GPU solution both Nvidia and AMD scaled incredibly well in this game with Nvidia getting about almost double the scaling and AMD getting about about 50 60 % scaling so that's very very very cool stuff to see but definite nod to AMD and definite nod to dual GPU solutions here again a game where perhaps the sixth gig frame buffer is not a benefit to the Titan Skyrim now Skyrim we're not running the same way we used to we've added a whole bunch of mods about 18 mods from the Steam Workshop making it much more demanding than it is in its bone-stock configuration which is what we used to run and that's part of the reason why when I used to show these performance graphs you'd never really see any difference between the cards now that has all changed the big winner here again is 660ti sli with titan coming up next gtx 680 coming up next and the AMD cards bringing up the rear so this is a game that seems to be better optimized for NVIDIA although that could be a function of the mods we're running actually running better on NVIDIA so we just selected mods that we thought looked really good and kind of went from there battlefield 3 getting to be a bit of an older game but still very telling so the Ares 3 remember this one has three gigs per GP as I say Ares 3 I'm in Ares 2 has 3 gigs of ram per GPU so once again we're running into a situation where we don't need that six gigs yet however as 4k resolution starts becoming more popular or if you want to run surround that might be more of a factor but when you don't need the extra RAM more GPU horsepower seems to really work out for you and in this particular game the areas to performed almost double as well as a single 7970 making it by far the ruler of the roost in battlefield 3 best possible solution you could get very similar results by using dual 79 7 at a much more reasonable price as well which is part of the reason that you shouldn't just completely ignore the Aries - on the graphs because that solution is available for it less than the cost of a Titan not necessarily more than the Aries to actually costs about five hundred six hundred dollars more than a GeForce GTX Titan so the Titan comes in a tie with the 660ti SLI which again is because we didn't need the vram with the other two single GPU solutions bringing up the rear once again Metro 2033 is a very interesting case study excellent scaling again double the performance of a single 7970 with the ares 2 highlighting why dual GPU solutions are often very awesome however looking at the 660ti compared to the 680 we see why dual GPU solutions aren't always necessarily that great Titan puts up a great showing again just destroying the numbers from the GTX 680 beating it by about 50 60 % here which r2 is the last game in our suite and I made a bit of a mistake on the graph but you guys won't know that because I'll fix it before I show it to you so don't worry about it so which or two at 1600 feet ultra preset including uber sampling really didn't give as much of an edge to the Titan as I had thought because Titan relies on lots of VRAM and uber sampling just are rather tight and relies on lots of VRAM to separate itself from dual GPU solutions which are - I thought would demand more vram because of the fact that we had over sampling on but the Ares 2 pulls away from everything else in which or - just proving that sometimes just more GPU horsepower is better than more memory or a larger single GPU however the Titan does put up a pretty good showing again tying the 660ti and beating the GTX 680 by about 50% so what does all of this mean it means that looking at current resolutions like 2560 by 1600 if you're only running a single monitor you may actually not get $1,000 worth of benefit with a GTX Titan especially when you compare it to solutions like two gtx 660ti is in sli or two competing cards running in crossfire however if you were to run a multi-way configuration titin would be the solution to go with because running a multi-way configuration presumably you're running at a very high resolution whether it's 4k or whether it's in surround and that's where you'll hopefully start to benefit from the additional RAM and the other situation where Titan starts to make sense is in a small form-factor configuration aries to pulled a good couple hundred more watts from the power supply than tighten that does show up on your power bill and that does affect both the heat output as well as the noise of your system so Titan is a great solution if you're looking to build a compact gaming rig so this is another situation where dual 660 TI's might not make sense because you need at least four expansion slots to even fit those so do you have to pay a premium for that single GPU single card high performance solution yes but if you're trying to work within a confined space if you're trying to get more V RAM or if you're a professional who wants to make use of the fact that the double precision for floating-point performance of this card is not crippled like it was on previous generation consumer models then something like a Titan might make sense thanks for checking out this video don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from our unboxings reviews and other computer videos