NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN Video Card Review @ [H]

MavericK96 said:
I swear I've seen [H] reviews trash products for being too expensive, though. I just don't see the value in this, outside of MAYBE SFF...not really even then TBH.
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They have, when there is no obvious value to them. But Titan does have a lot of (subjective) value there. It's just that perhaps many people disagree with that argument. I've seen it most often when you're buying a custom cooling/OC edition card that provides absolutely no performance benefit and costs 25% more.
 
Stoly said:
We ARE seeing prices like that,

Too bad AMD doesn't have a Premium card. otherwise Titan's price would be much lower.
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Really, where are the $800 GTX 680 and 7970 cards?
 
Term-X said:
I think the card is great. It fills spot for higher res gaming and 120hz gaming without the plethora of issues I've had when it comes to crossfire/sli. It definitely calls for a premium price. That said, $999 is silly. And I'm not saying this just because it's more than I'd like to spend. It's much more than it's worth. This is coming from someone who spent $720 (CAD) on a GeForce 2 Ultra on release day. If it were in the $700~ bracket, I could understand.


Of course, this card will be sold out hours. The world we live in.
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lol.

$720 CAD at today's value is basically $1000 CAD today.

People tend to forget how bad inflation has been.
 
Back to topic.

It seems to me there is not that much of a performance increase with Titan Tri-sli vs Sli, except in a few titles and extreme resolutions.

I wonder how much of a difference would it be on crysis3 Tri-sli vs SLI. You got ~40 fps, maybe sli could do 30?
 
Mchart said:
lol.

$720 CAD at today's value is basically $1000 CAD today.

People tend to forget how bad inflation has been.
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I remember quite well what I paid for my 6800 Ultra at launch..... *shudder*

Was it worth it to me at the time? Yep.

I'm still debating snagging two Titan's, just for CUDA processing of video.

It may be a niche product for a niche market, but what a beautiful little niche it is... :D
 
Filter said:
ive had many differnet versions of SLI starting with the my BFG 6800gtx series till my 680 classifeies. and have never experienced micro stuttering on any of my personal rigs.

Ive seen the video's and can see and understand what others have had issues with it. But i personally have never seeen it on any of my builds ive done personally or for friends/family
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I hope you tell cannondale06 that someday ;)
 
Great review, as always, guys. At $699, I'd have to give Titan a long, hard look. With the ability to max everything at native resolution on a QHD 27" monitor with AA+AF at a similar price, I could eventually justify one. At a cool even 1k, no way. I'll stick to a 680 and deal with the limitations.
 
Tamlin_WSGF said:
I wish they would offer that cooling solution on their other cards as well. From the dbA readings done in other reviews, it seems like a superior solution compared to most aftermarked solutions even.
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I agree. The cooler is a piece of art and it sets the bar high for future products. Can you hear me AMD.....CAN YOU HEAR ME AMD. Guess not because they are deaf from their leaf blowers.
 
ICDP said:
Taken directly from the review.

"For the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition we are using the newly released Catalyst 13.2 Beta 6 and latest CAP. "

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/02/21/nvidia_geforce_gtx_titan_video_card_review/2#.USaXTldi5I0

Now look at the graphic shown on the test setup page of the review. It clearly states that Catalyst 13.2 Beta 6 and Cap 12.11 CAP 2 are used for the AMD HD 7970 GHz card.

So yes, until [H] can confirm otherwise they did make that mistake. Using these redundant CAPs will overwrite newer more optimised profiles for Far Cry 3, Crysis 3 and potentially other games tested. So some of the AMD results in this review are suspect. If we stick to the scientific method this mistake renders the entire AMD test results invalid by virtue of the fact it is configured incorrectly. I would be saying the same thing if [H] used drivers from 3 months ago for the Nvidia cards.
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Testing was done with Catalyst 13.2 Beta 6. The CAP information was leftover cut and paste information we use in reviews. I forgot to take that out of the table. It is fixed now. We used the newer CAP embedded in 13.2 Beta 6, so testing is not in error, it was just a typo on that page, sorry for the confusion. Page 2 is fixed.
 
Safety said:
@Kyle and Brent - A favor to ask: Would it be possible for you to gauge CUDA performance by installing the free Octane v1.1 Demo here:

http://render.otoy.com/downloads.php

The benchmark scene 'Octane_Benchmark.ocs' can be found here:

http://render.otoy.com/downloads/OctaneRender_1_0_DemoSuite.zip

To start the bench, right click on the node called 'RenderTarget PT' and select 'Render'.

Underneath the image, on the left-hand corner should be a figure X.XX Ms/sec. For reference a GTX 680 averages 3.01 Ms/sec

Thanks!
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Cool test, well, I tried to run it on the TITAN machine, it won't render. Must be some sort of compatibility issue, it just sits there and does nothing. I double checked it on my own machine with a GTX 680, and it works, I got 3.06 Ms/sec on my own machine. However, on TITAN, it won't do anything when I click on Render. Sorry :( I tried!

EDIT!!!! Nevermind!

I got it to work finally, I had to manually go to preferences and manually select the CUDA capable video cards, it was not automatically detecting CUDA devices, so I had to select them manually.

Sorry, not use to the program, but I understand it now. You can select 1, 2 or 3 CUDA devices, as I have 3 cards installed separately in the system, regardless of SLI being enabled or disabled by the control panel. The program doesn't recognize TITAN, so you have to manually enable which cards you want to use each time.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Final Results

1 TITAN Card = 6.25 Ms/sec in 1:37
2 TITAN Cards = 12.50 Ms/sec in 50 seconds
3 TITAN Cards = 18.86 Ms/sec in 31 seconds
 
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Brent_Justice said:
Cool test, well, I tried to run it on the TITAN machine, it won't render. Must be some sort of compatibility issue, it just sits there and does nothing. I double checked it on my own machine with a GTX 680, and it works, I got 3.06 Ms/sec on my own machine. However, on TITAN, it won't do anything when I click on Render. Sorry :( I tried!

EDIT!!!! Nevermind!

I got it to work finally, I had to manually go to preferences and manually select the CUDA capable video cards, it was not automatically detecting CUDA devices, so I had to select them manually.

With SLI Disabled - 18.86 Ms/sec and took 31 seconds to complete

EDIT AGAIN!!!!!!!!! IGNORE That result above, that's with all 3 cards selected

Sorry, not use to the program, but I understand it now. You can select 1, 2 or 3 CUDA devices, as I have 3 cards installed separately in the program, regardless of SLI being enabled or disabled.

1 TITAN Card =
2 TITAN Cards =
3 TITAN Cards =
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I asssume it uses FP32? otherwise not impressive.
 
Brent_Justice said:
Cool test, well, I tried to run it on the TITAN machine, it won't render. Must be some sort of compatibility issue, it just sits there and does nothing. I double checked it on my own machine with a GTX 680, and it works, I got 3.06 Ms/sec on my own machine. However, on TITAN, it won't do anything when I click on Render. Sorry :( I tried!

EDIT!!!! Nevermind!

I got it to work finally, I had to manually go to preferences and manually select the CUDA capable video cards, it was not automatically detecting CUDA devices, so I had to select them manually.

With SLI Disabled - 18.86 Ms/sec and took 31 seconds to complete

EDIT AGAIN!!!!!!!!! IGNORE That result above, that's with all 3 cards selected

Sorry, not use to the program, but I understand it now. You can select 1, 2 or 3 CUDA devices, as I have 3 cards installed separately in the program, regardless of SLI being enabled or disabled.

Final Results

1 TITAN Card = 6.25 Ms/sec in 1:37
2 TITAN Cards = 12.50 Ms/sec in 50 seconds
3 TITAN Cards = 18.86 Ms/sec in 31 seconds
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Quit talking about 3 Titan cards together. Now I have to do something about this wood.
 
Yea maybe 7980 for 800$, 5% faster than Titan. It would be great bang for buck. They are insane, 1000$ GPU that will worth maybe 300$ in one year or less. 1000$ is madness and i am not mad enough or rich to buy that. Rather save for car or something.
 
Boycott! This card is nothing but nvidia's attempt to raise the price bar on their graphics cards.....booo on you nvidia!
 
BatJoe said:
Sure it is. They are aiming it at gamers not workstations.
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Titan is aimed at gamers with $$$$. As Obi Wan said "These aren't the low-priced AMD droids you're looking for". Storm Trooper said "Move along, these aren't the low-priced AMD droids we're looking for".
 
ragecase said:
While everyone is impressed with the performance of Titan....


It would of been nice to find a review somewhere that called nvidia out on Titan costing $1000, especially in the context of GTX 680/GK104 clearly being a mid-range card while Titan is more in line with flagship cards of the past. Such as GTX 580, 480, 285, 280.

Sure nvidia is trying to promote it as a 'boutique' card, but it's still a 500mm2 or so die, with a wide memory bus, lots of VRAM and taken off their compute line of GPUs, just like all their past gaming flagships until 28nm. Historically nvidia has delivered 80% more performance on their new node's flagship against the last node's. That is exactly what Titan does against GTX 580, whereas GTX 680 gave only 30-35%. Let them promote it as whatever they want, we all see it for what it is; the real GTX 680 with its price doubled.

It's a rip-off. Just like the GTX 680 was a rip-off. Nvidia has jacked prices twofold this generation and no one is calling them on it but the gamers who are having to pay these ripoff prices, or stay on 40nm. At least we have $400 7970GE that gives 80% the performance of a $1000 Titanic.
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This is meaningless.

Price is not determined by what goes into something.

That's called a "cost plus" pricing model, where you compute the cost of making something, add a little margin for yourself, and then sell it. That is considered a bad joke in economics, not reflective of how pricing is set in the real world.

The real cost of a product is determined by what people are willing to pay for it, and what its supply level is.

The demand curve, what people are willing to pay is determined in great deal by what competition is on the market, what alternatives there are, and is simply a curve that states "at price X1, Y1 number of people are willing to buy an item, at price X2, Y2 number of people are willing to buy an item", etc. etc.

Then they figure out how many they have to sell/reasonably can make/etc.etc. and set the price as close as possible to where the price causes the amount of people that matches the number of units available to want to buy it. This maximizes revenues, which - of course - is the sole purpose for the existence of any business.

The Titan is much faster than what the competition can do with one GPU (and has some added compute features that are desirable as well. While not a super limited part, it, volumes are not vast, particularly due to the Tesla sales, and the need for chips for the Titan super computer.

So the fact that the competition doesn't have anything to counter it, means that people will be willing to pay more, and the relatively limited supply means they move further up the demand curve, and this naturally results in a high priced card.

It doesn't matter in the slightest what went into its design, development and production and how much it cost them. This is utterly irrelevant in price setting.

When the equation changes (supply increases shifting the supply curve, or competition comes out with something faster, shifting the demand curve) if it is still on the market, then pricing will likely adjust accordingly, but as it is right now, this is a fair price. If you think it costs too much, then don't buy it. That's exactly what they want you to do. You represent that portion on their demand curve below their pricing cutoff that they weren't planning on selling to in the first place.


What you fail to realize is that there is no such thing as a universal value of a product. It all depends on when, where, and how it is being sold, and what else is available at the time. The only fair price, is that price which satisfies supply and demand.
 
Technikal said:
Money is no object to me it's just the price for that video card is just plain stupid. I dunno maybe I grew up and getting old paying more than $250- $300 for a video card now days seems out to lunch and obsessive borderline mental disorder worthy. I think of all that wasted money I blew in the past..almost makes me sick.
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I'm like you in that regard. Money is not an object for this card. However, I care about my money and where I spend it and at this price point vs. performance. I don't believe it's in that range. If it was $700 - $750, that might be my sweet spot for it. Then I'd go in for two or three.
 
BatJoe said:
Sure it is. They are aiming it at gamers not workstations.
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I think the Titan would be a great choice for a pro gamer at the most competitive level where a single video card is the weapon of choice.
 
I now at least 5 freaks that would sell their ass for that GPU and that are type off consumers they are aiming on. Rich people play with Ferraries and expensive girls not with GPUs.
 
roki977 said:
I now at least 5 freaks that would sell their ass for that GPU and that are type off consumers they are aiming on. Rich people play with Ferraries and expensive girls not with GPUs.
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Are they hot? Pics! Well post the pics in GenMay at least.
 
Zarathustra[H];1039637025 said:
This is meaningless.
.
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[Long econ lecture deleted]

All that being said, companies DO make mistakes in pricing. After all there is a reson they call economics "the dismal science" ;)
 
SonDa5 said:
I think the Titan would be a great choice for a pro gamer at the most competitive level where a single video card is the weapon of choice.
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Agreed.

So far here's the list of buyers:

SFF Users
Non-SLI Gamers
120Hz Gaming
Multi-Monitor Gaming
Design and Computing
Professional Gaming
Custom PC Buyers
And those that want it just because they can.

If you don't fit in these categories, you shouldn't feel upset about the $1000 tag.

Why?

Because all of the users in that list will gladly pay it or at least thinking about it right now.
 
DooKey said:
Are they hot? Pics! Well post the pics in GenMay at least.
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That will cost you two Titans at least, more for public abuse.

I ll wait for Titan Lightning extreme. 6gb kind off sucks, not future proof. 12 is enough.
 
rinaldo00 said:
[Long econ lecture deleted]

All that being said, companies DO make mistakes in pricing. After all there is a reson they call economics "the dismal science" ;)
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The theory on this is pretty solid, but where it fails is often the data collection.

As with any other analysis, garbage in = garbage out. Often the data to reliably produce good supply and demand curves simply doesn't exist, or is based on unreliable survey type information, so instead educated guesses are made.

That being said, I think that given the lack of competition for this part, and its relatively limited supply, $1000 is probably not a bad first stab at the pricing. If it turns out they were wrong, they can always lower it.
 
Zarathustra[H];1039637025 said:
Wall of knowledge and sense
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I wish I could thank/rep/whatever this post. At least someone realizes that Nvidia isn't just going to price it less than it will sell for out of charity to the PC building hobby.
 
LigTasm said:
I wish I could thank/rep/whatever this post. At least someone realizes that Nvidia isn't just going to price it less than it will sell for out of charity to the PC building hobby.
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I've been saying this till I'm blue in the face. Market forces are driving the price and will continue to do so. Nvidia doesn't owe anyone a cheap video card.
 
DooKey said:
I've been saying this till I'm blue in the face. Market forces are driving the price and will continue to do so. Nvidia doesn't owe anyone a cheap video card.
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Yeah, it doesn't make me mad at all despite how much I would like to have one. I owned a 690 already and I just don't have that kind of cash right now. But I'm glad they set the bar higher for the next gen.

Also, a guy I work with just put 3 of them on pre-order to replace his quad-SLI 680's. Bastard. :D
 
Zarathustra[H];1039637055 said:
Often the data to reliably produce good supply and demand curves simply doesn't exist, or is based on unreliable survey type information, so instead educated guesses are made.
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Exactly, and you know why? Because economics has to deal with human EMOTION (the demand side) unlike mathematics (my major)
 
LigTasm said:
Yeah, it doesn't make me mad at all despite how much I would like to have one. I owned a 690 already and I just don't have that kind of cash right now. But I'm glad they set the bar higher for the next gen.

Also, a guy I work with just put 3 of them on pre-order to replace his quad-SLI 680's. Bastard. :D
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Where did he pre-order? Damn Newegg only lets you order one at a time.
 
Zarathustra[H];1039637055 said:
The theory on this is pretty solid, but where it fails is often the data collection.

As with any other analysis, garbage in = garbage out. Often the data to reliably produce good supply and demand curves simply doesn't exist, or is based on unreliable survey type information, so instead educated guesses are made.

That being said, I think that given the lack of competition for this part, and its relatively limited supply, $1000 is probably not a bad first stab at the pricing. If it turns out they were wrong, they can always lower it.
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Quoted for truth. It's harder to raise MSRP than it is to lower it ;).

///AMG said:
I am quite perplexed by the TITAN. Compared to a GE 7970 is a mild 30% increase or so apples to apples and while that is huge the price gap is even larger. Its more than twice as expensive as the mean price for the 7970. Now I have to decide whether not having to deal with SLI/XFire is worth the not insubstantial price increase hmm.
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Here, you want to know why? Enjoy the stuttery GE 7970, people who want the best will go Titan... yes, it's pricey as all hell, but it's worth it for those with the cash to play:

pcperframetimestitan.png


Titan falls right in line with 680 SLI in their review.

And, it's only 10% or so behind a 690 in most reviews... as a single GPU :eek: .
 
Its 35% faster than 680 but only 10% slower than 690?

700-800$ would be ok range in my opinion. 1000$ sounds very expensive.
 
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