The NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X Review
by Ryan Smith on March 17, 2015 3:00 PM ESTOur 2015 GPU Benchmark Suite
Also kicking off alongside GTX Titan X today will be the first article to use our new 2015 GPU benchmark suite.
For 2015 we have upgraded or replaced most of our games, retiring several long-time titles including Bioshock: Infinite, Metro, and our last DirectX 10 game, Crysis Warhead. Our returning titles are Battlefield 4 and Crysis 3, the former of which is still a popular MP title to this day, and the latter continuing to pulverize GPUs well before we hit its highest settings.
Joining these 2 games are 7 new titles. Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Far Cry 4 are our new action/shooter games, while Dragon Age: Inquisition rides the line between an action game and an RPG. Meanwhile for strategy games we have Civilization: Beyond Earth and Total War: Attila, these two games representing the latest entries in their respective series. Rounding out our collection is GRID Autosport, the latest GRID game from Codemasters, and the unique first person puzzle/exploration game The Talos Principle from Croteam.
AnandTech GPU Bench 2015 Game List | ||||
Game | Genre | API(s) | ||
Battlefield 4 | FPS | DX11 + Mantle | ||
Crysis 3 | FPS | DX11 | ||
Shadow of Mordor | Action/Open World | DX11 | ||
Civilization: Beyond Earth | Strategy | DX11 + Mantle | ||
Dragon Age: Inquisition | RPG | DX11 + Mantle | ||
The Talos Principle | First Person Puzzle | DX11 | ||
Far Cry 4 | FPS | DX11 | ||
Total War: Attila | Strategy | DX11 | ||
GRID Autosport | Racing | DX11 |
With new low-level APIs ramping up in 2015, we’re going to be paying particular attention to APIs starting this year, as everyone is interested in seeing what Vulkan (née Mantle) and DirectX 12 can do. Unless otherwise noted, going forward all benchmarks will be using low-level APIs when available, meaning DX12/Vulkan/Mantle when possible.
Meanwhile from a design standpoint our benchmark settings remain unchanged. For lower-end cards we’ll look at 1080p at various quality settings when practical, and for high-end cards we’ll be looking at 1080p and above at the highest quality settings. The one exception to this is 4K, which at 2.25x the resolution of 1440p remains difficult to hit playable framerates, in which case we’ll also include a lower quality setting to showcase what kind of quality hit it takes to make 4K playable on current video cards.
The Test
As for our hardware testbed, it remains unchanged from 2014, being composed of an overclocked Core i7-4960X hosed in an NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition case.
CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
Video Cards: | AMD Radeon R9 295X2 AMD Radeon R9 290X AMD Radeon HD 7990 NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 |
Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 347.84 Beta AMD Catalyst Cat 15.3 Beta |
OS: | Windows 8.1 Pro |
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dragonsqrrl - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
Had no idea that non reference Hawaii cards were generally undervolted resulting in lower power consumption. Source?chizow - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
There is some science behind it, heat results in higher leakage resulting in higher power consumption. But yes I agree, the reviews show otherwise, in fact, they show the cards that dont' throttle and boost unabated draw even more power, closer to 300W. So yes, that increased perf comes at the expense of higher power consumption, not sure why the AMD faithful believe otherwise.FlushedBubblyJock - Saturday, March 21, 2015 - link
Duh. It's because they hate Physx.Kutark - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
Yes, some of the new designs from aftermarket are cooler and quiter, but they dont use less power, the GPU is generating the power, the aftermarket companies can't alter that. They can only tame the beast, so to speak.Yojimbo - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
Would be a good point if the performance were the same. But the Titan X is 50% faster. The scores are also total system power usage under gaming load, not card usage. Running at 50% faster frame rates is going to tax other parts of the system more, as well.Kutark - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
You're kidding right. Your framerate in no way affects your power usage.nevcairiel - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
Actually, it might. If the GPU is faster, it might need more CPU power, which in turn can increase power draw from the CPU.DarkXale - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
Of course. Its the entire point of DX12/Mantle/Vulcan/Metal to reduce per-frame CPU work, and as a consequence per-frame CPU power consumption.Yojimbo - Tuesday, March 17, 2015 - link
The main point of my post is that Titan X gets 50% more performance/system watt. But yes, your frame rate should affect your power usage if you are GPU-bound. The CPU, for instance, will be working harder maintaining the higher frame rates. How much harder, I have no idea, but it's a variable that needs to be considered before testbug00's antecedent can be considered true.dragonsqrrl - Wednesday, March 18, 2015 - link
Actually frame rates have a lot to do with power usage.I don't think that needs any further explanation, anyone who's even moderately informed knows this, and even if they didn't could probably figure out why this might be the case in about 10 seconds.