Conclusion
Despite a relatively high price, seeing the TITAN X go through the motions of chewing through games is really something to behold. It is one massively powerful card that highlights just how far NVIDIA’s 28nm architectures have progressed since Kepler was launched. There will surely be detractors who will point towards what may be coming from the competition sometime in the future and deride the $999 price point. The fact of the matter is you can get this performance now, in preparation for some major gaming launches (Hardline, Witcher III, GTA V and others) rather than waiting on hypothetical numbers and nebulous availability timelines to be proven true.
With that being said, the TITAN X also points towards an interesting trend in the current graphics card market. With NVIDIA obviously marching to the beat of their own drummer rather than looking over their shoulders at AMD, they can charge whatever the market will bear and still sell cards at a wildfire pace. There’s simply a lack of consistent competition to drive down costs. This leads to more expensive GPUs being foisted on anyone who wants or needs leading edge horsepower while buyers with less money are treated to some awesome price / performance values like the GTX 980 and R9 290X.
So what does the TITAN X get you in relation to what’s currently available for purchase? A whole lot actually. If you are operating a 2560x1440 screen, performance lies at nearly the mid-way point between a single GTX 980 and two GTX 980’s in SLI. In comparison to AMD’s higher end solutions, we’re looking an average of 45% higher framerates than an R9 290X which puts it within spitting distance of the powerful R9 295X2.
4K is where the TITAN X really begins to shine as its larger memory footprint can aid framerates in bandwidth-limited scenarios. Here it is able to pull further ahead of single cards and even closer to dual card setups. However, the true benefits of that massive 12GB will only be seen in some titles since most games don’t require more than 4GB for adequate high resolution performance. In most areas we see the underlying GPU architecture becoming a bottleneck long before bandwidth saturation factors into the equation.
Of special note here is the TITAN’s perceived value against dual core setups like the GTX 980 SLI and R9 295X2. It goes without saying that we prefer a single powerful card to a less expensive SLI or Crossfire setup but let’s reiterate what the befits are. With a card like the TITAN X, gamers can neatly avoid waiting around for multi GPU profiles which are either delayed or never show up and they can also benefit from lower overall power consumption. Space is also freed up for ultra fast x8 PCIe-based SSDs and there’s always the possibility of adding another card sometime down the road for even better performance.
That situation is put into stark contrast when we look at what’s happening with AMD’s driver development as of late. Not only has it been nearly four months since their last revision – which is an eternity in the PC gaming space- but the new release they gave us in time for the TITAN X review leaves much to be desired as well. At 1440P it performed admirably (albeit with the Metro: Last Light problems remaining unresolved months after they first reared up) but 4K compatibility was a hit and miss affair at best. Crossfire profiles were either broken, missing or under-performing in Metro: Last Light, Hitman Absolution, Dying Light and Far Cry 4. That’s four out of the nine games we included in this review and that poor showing ultimately pushed down the card’s 4K framerates. With that taken into account the R9 295X2 is simply not a viable alternative to the $999 TITAN X at this time, even at its current price of $699.
Perhaps the most shocking aspects of this review are the TITAN X’s power consumption profile and acoustics. Even with 12GB of GDDR5 memory, at load it actually requires less power than an R9 290X even though its idle needs are a few watts higher. NVIDIA’s bruiser is also able to remain extremely quiet which is a huge relief considering the massive amounts of noise put out by a reference R9 290X when its operating in Uber mode. After seeing what GM200 can do when air cooled, any similarly performing solutions that need water cooling will look a bit crude in comparison.
While not spectacular in its abilities, the TITAN X does offer a reasonable amount of overclocking headroom. Should you for some reason need it, expect about 10% of Boost overhead and a good 15% on the GDDR5. The actual framerate improvements don’t amount to much but they’re there for the taking.
All in all the TITAN X is an impressive graphics card which has obviously been built with an eye towards future gaming at 4K, single precision data sets and VR environments. In many ways it follows the original TITAN’s launch perfectly: there’s a performance uplift of around 40% against its closest GeForce-branded competitor and costs $999. However, while the first TITAN was primarily marketed as developer-centric, the newest iteration lacks full speed double precision support and is obviously targeted towards gamers. And will those gamers buy the TITAN X? For the best possible performance available right now, they should.
