With a tag this high, price has almost become deliberately irrelevant
The Titan awoke at the end of October last year - benchmarking at 17.59 petaflops it's the fastest of the current gen of supercomputers. Why would you want to know about a supercomputer when I'm meant to be talking about a big ol* graphics card? Well, Nvidia supplied 18,688 Tesla K20 cards to pack out the Titan and in exchange has nabbed the name to stick on its gaming-focused versions with the same GPU.
There was always the feeling that the GK104 GPU at the heart of the GTX 680 wasn't the fastest implementation of Nvidia's Kepler architecture, way back when I first got hold of our test unit in March of last year. That was confirmed a few months later when we saw those Tesla K20 professional graphics card, home to the full-fat Kepler core, the GK110.
The instant that card was confirmed, we were all taking bets on how long it would be before Nvidia took the plunge and dropped the GK 110 into a proper gaming desktop card. None of us thought we would have to wait this long - at a time when we were half expecting a new generation of graphics cards to hit.
Sadly, it looks like the great graphics powers-that-be have decided we don't need a new generation right now. AMD has announced it’s sticking with the current range of HD 7000 cards right through 2013, and we're only likely to see a new lineup at the end of the year. And with the launch of Nvidia’s GTX Titan I would bet that the next line of GTX 700 series cards - based on the upcoming Maxwell chips - aren't going to be tippingup until the end of the summer at the earliest.
Whatever happens with the next generation of graphics cards, it's going to be incredibly difficult for any new GPU to be able to best the power available to the GK110 silicon. And as such this is probably going to be the fastest single-GPU card we'll see until Nvidia itself decides to pull the top chip out of the next-gen Tesla cards and offer it up to the desktop crowd.
So. for the foreseeable future, this is the fastest single-GPU card around. And that's exactly what Nvidia was after, as Tom Petersen. Nvidia's director of Technical Marketing, told me a few weeks before launch: “This is without doubt the biggest, baddest, and fastest graphics card we've ever built. The key thing about it is that it does crush all other single-GPU cards we've ever built and it crushes all other single GPUs anyone's ever built."
That assertion about its single-GPU credentials is really the key to the GTX Titan. That's because it’s not actually the fastest graphics card anyone's ever built, in fact both the EVGA GTX 690 and Club 3D HD 7990 we're putting it up against are faster cards out of the blocks.
But is overall straight-line performance everything? Nvidia would say no. while AMD would say absolutely, yes. Who's right? Well, as Obi-Wan would say. you will find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view...
Lovely bones
Before we get into any of that, let's take a look at what exactly is sitting inside that lovely magnesium alloy chassis. The big thing - and I mean that entirely literally - is the GK110 GPU. Sitting in the middle of the PCB is a vast chunk of silicon with over seven billion transistors happily humming away. And despite being manufactured on the smallest GPU process available to Nvidia. those 28mm transistors still end up making the GKI10 chip around 520mm2 in size.
Inside that silicon is the most complex graphics architecture around, with 2.688 single and 896 double-precision CUDA cores. Those are arrayed over 14 Nvidia streaming microprocessors (SMX), set in five graphics processing clusters. The fully specced GK 110 chip has 15 SMX units, but with yields giving more GPUs with 14 working SMX than with 15 SMX units, it was a product decision to ship with one shut down. That doesn't mean you're getting less than the Tesla crowd - the full-fat Tesla K20X is runs with 14 SMX units and 2.688 single precision cores.
Coupled with the vast number of both single and double precision CUDA cores, are 224 texture units and 48 ROPs. Those double precision cores aren't enabled by default, you have to turn them on in the Nvidia control panel and that limits the base clock. It's recommended to keep them switched off when you're gaming, and to throw the switch only when you're going to be doing some serious compute-based grunt work. And with the Titan, the amateur 3D world is going to be rather excited.
In terms of clocks, the GTX Titan is quite conservative, compared to the GHz GPUs we've become used to since the GTX 680 launched. Still, with a boost clock of 876MHz it's no slouch, and with the advances made in the new iteration of GPU Boost there's overclocking aplenty available for this card.
Those are all relatively impressive numbers, and then you come to the frame buffer. With over 6GB of GDDR5 this thing is capable of some incredibly high-resolution gaming. And that's arguably where this kind of'ultra-enthusiast'card is targeted. With the new HD standard of 4K now on the collective radar, it makes sense for the top graphics cards of today to be ready for this new kind of image resolution revolution.
So. you've got a massive GPU. running at relatively high clock speeds with a huge amount of video memory attached to it. Vou’re going to need to plumb it directly into Sizewell B, aren't you? To be honest, this is the biggest surprise of this GTX Titan package - it's got a TOP of just 250W. That’s comparable with the TDP of the slower AMD Radeon HD 7970. This is all thanks to the power-conscious Kepler design we've already seen in the GTX 680, and it means we were easily able to get a three-way 5LI setup running comfortably on a 1.200W PSU.
Soft sells
As with the GTX 680, the Titan isn't jsut about the hardware sat on the PCB - the software is almost as important as the actual silicon itself. And just as GPU Boost was vital to the success of the GTX 680, so the new GPU Boost 2.0 is just as vital to the GTX Titan. It has to be said the performance improvements don't sound that earth-shattering. Tom Petersen estimates it will offer three to seven per cent higher frame rates, compared with the original GPU Boost.
But it's the way it's getting there that's impressive. The focus that was placed on the power that the GPU was using has now been switched around, so the GPU clock is automatically boosted in line with the temperature the chip is running at. This has meant that Nvidia can be a lot more cavalier about the voltage it pushes through the chip - as such, it doesn't have to worry anymore about the combination of high voltage and high temperature.
In the original GPU Boost there was no overvoltaging. Nvidia imposed a hard limit on the amount of voltage you could push through to ensure this combination never hit — much to the consternation of the overclocking community.
"The reason there is a reliability limit on voltage is because of one thing,' says Peterson. "When you have high temperatures and high voltage you blow up transistors. We are regulating based on temperature so now we can have both high voltage and high temperatures being a possibility, but they never happen at the same time. Now we can raise the reliability voltage without changing anything else. That single change is a lot of what helps us get that performance boost."
So now there is a higher standard voltage, as well as the option to opt-in and allow overvoltaging within whichever overclocking software you choose to use on your expensive ol' card. You can specify a temperature you want to hit as a limit, and the software will automatically adjust clock speed and voltage in an effort to boost the GPU as much as it can within the boundaries of that temperature. With this in mind. I was able to get up to around 1.175MHz, but with a quality water-cooling block that could be raised significantly.
Aspirations
But what does that all mean for performance? Well, it means at a base level it's quite tough to accurately measure. Each GTX Titan graphics card will perform slightly differently, and that can be based on not just different GPUs, but also on varying environmental conditions. That said, my test card clock was happily topping the IGHz mark without my even touching the overclocking controls. Sadly, that also meant that when I did start getting happy with the E VGA Precision Overclocking tools - and even after I stuck a 120Hz offset onto the base clock - I wasn't really seeing much in the way of actual frame rate improvements.
I can comfortably confirm that the GTX Titan is the fastest single-GPU graphics card on the market - but it's not actually fast enough. For the most part, it's around a third faster than the preceding GTX 680, and in general, around 15 to 20 per cent faster than the top-end HD 7970 we've tested. We might add there are a lot of variations compared with the Radeon silicon, with some game engines running 45 per cent faster on the Titan. One in particular, DiRT Showdown. actually ran a couple of frames slower than the HD 7970.
The important thing is it's not even close to twice as fast, given that it's retailing at more than twice the price of the top-spec- and suddenly second-tier - single-GPU graphics cards. It also posts consistently lower benchmark scores than either the cheaper EVGA GTX 690, or the Club 3D HD 7990. Now, I completely understand that this straight-line performance comes at a cost to your sanity - such is the way with multi-GPU solutions-but by all established logic you would have to say the GTX Titan ought to be at least the same price as these faster cards, if not cheaper.
But Nvidia isn’t just looking to make a substantial profit by pricing its Titan at over £800, it's making a statement. A statement that this card is not for you. This is the kind of product to aspire to, built in relatively low numbers for a niche market, mostly so it can point to the card as the fastest single-GPU on the planet. It's not really an enthusiast part either - Nvidia is calling the new segment ultra-enthusiast, but that’s almost disingenuous too. The sort of person that's going to own this card is unlikely to even know it's there. They've got it as part of a custom-built PC, bought as a whole, with the proviso given to the system integrator that they want the best PC gaming experience on offer.
There is no doubt the Titan will offer a great PC gaming experience, and even if you don't sign up to Nvidia's money-no-object strategy, it's still a very desirable device. It will run any game you throw at it - at incredibly high-resolutions - and doesn't suffer from any of the vagaries of multi-GPU gaming to get you there. It's also very discrete, offering all that power without a huge demand on your PSU or your eardrums. And it's a beautifully engineered product, a truly lovely slice of high-spec. high performance tech that you'll desperately want if you ever come to hold one in your hands.
But it's not an upgrade. It's not a card many people are likely to order for their existing machine. You don't buy this card for your 24-inch screen gaming setup - or if you do it's because you can't afford a K20 and have a penchant for 3D modelling. Mostly you'll buy this as part of a premium system, and you'll be very happy once the buyer's remorse has gone. It's a terrible shame that it's been priced out of the reach of most of us mere mortals. It's sad to think this is the fastest single-GPU card we’ll see for a good couple of years - but the Titan is still a slick, impressive feat of both design and engineering.
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