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$3000 GeForce GTX TITAN Z Tested, Less Performance Than $1500 R9 295X2

Posted by Soulskill on from the spending-a-lot-of-green-for-team-green dept.

Vigile writes: NVIDIA announced its latest dual-GPU flagship card, the GeForce GTX Titan Z, at the GPU Technology Conference in late March with a staggering price point of $2999. Since that time, AMD announced and released the Radeon R9 295X2, its own dual-GPU card with a price tag of $1499. PC Perspective finally put the GTX Titan Z to the test and found that from a PC gamer's view, the card is way overpriced for the performance it offers. At both 2560x1440 and 3840x2160 (4K), the R9 295X2 offered higher and more consistent frame rates, sometimes by as much as 30%. The AMD card also only takes up two slots (though it does have a water cooling radiator to worry about) while the NVIDIA GTX Titan Z is a three-slot design. The Titan Z is quieter and uses much less power, but gamers considering a $1500 or $3000 graphics card selection are likely not overly concerned with power efficiency.

31 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. So glad it's over by TWX · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm so glad that I got the gaming bug out of my system when a ridiculously-priced video card was $300, and mainstream cards were in the $90-160 range...

    This is ridiculous.

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    1. Re:So glad it's over by crioca · · Score: 4, Informative

      I'm so glad that I got the gaming bug out of my system when a ridiculously-priced video card was $300, and mainstream cards were in the $90-160 range... This is ridiculous.

      That's still pretty much the case; the difference today is that some people make, or try to make, their living off playing & broadcasting their gameplay. This means they need to be able to run the latest games at the highest specs, record and livestream all at the same time without missing a beat.

    2. Re:So glad it's over by NemoinSpace · · Score: 2

      I have a built in Nvidia 8300 GS that came with the hand me down dell XPS-410 my wife brought home from work.
      I put 6 GB ram in even though Crucial and Dell both tell you it won't work. Should have went for 8 so I could have a bigger ram drive. - I actually ran out of memory the other night running 64 bit Waterfox! (that was a first.) I put a ragged old OCX SSD in it that I bought for $20 when OCZ put themselves out of business. Then I put windows 8 on it for $30. It refuses to update to 8.1. (how bad are the H1B's over at Microsoft anyway?) I will probably upgrade to CentOS 7 soon because this computer will probably last till 2020.
      Isn't this sad? I can squeeze crap out of a buffalo nickle. But the real challenge is assembling absolute garbage into a fairly usable system.
      I don't knock people that buy $1,000 video cards, they usually pay well for doing things like adjusting their "tiny fonts". Really, get off my lawn.

    3. Re:So glad it's over by Sir_Sri · · Score: 2

      Except that Titan isn't really a gaming card. The big draw is the double precision floating point performance. The GTX 780 - which is the same part for gaming purposes, is about 700 dollars (they have almost identical single precision performance, which is what gaming is), so 2 780's would be about 1500 dollars (to compare to the titan black dual GPU monstrosity).

      And you don't need top end parts unless you're gaming on 4k (which is either a 3500 dollar monitor for a good one, or a ~500 dollar Seiki TV that is capped at 30fps with crappy colour).

      There has *always* been more expensive hardware than most people need or want. But for people who have money there's nothing particularly wrong with having super expensive stuff. If you made 500k a year what would you spend it on? What about 5 million? What about 50 million?. If nothing else the power of one of these 3000 or 1500 dollar cards is going to be mainstream for 300 bucks in 3 or 4 years (or sooner if TSMC can get 20nm working), it doesn't do you any harm that someone else can buy it.

    4. Re: So glad it's over by O('_')O_Bush · · Score: 2

      But they also want to play at very high resolutions, very high refresh rates (120hz-144hz), and are often recording as well...

      --
      while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
    5. Re:So glad it's over by TapeCutter · · Score: 2

      Video cards are not just for games these days, my $150 GTX 750 maxes out at just over a teraflop, which is significantly faster than any multi-million dollar pre-Y2K super computer ever built. I really can't see how vector processing can help anyone to adjust their fonts, but it can solve all sorts of difficult engineering, logistics, AI, and design problems. The fact you can do calculations on a commodity video card that (even with unlimited military budget) were simply not practical in the 1990's is nothing short of a technological miracle.

      But hey, if you want to install a private sub-station and a 1990's super computer in your shed because your too tight to buy a new PC, who am I to judge?

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    6. Re:So glad it's over by TapeCutter · · Score: 3, Informative

      That's kind of what they do. Not sure about other cards but Nvidia cards handle compatibility with something called compute capability. A developer then makes the trade-off that will land somewhere between....

      Extreme compatibility -- work on all nvidia cards and use none of the new hardware features.
      Extreme performance -- work on only the latest cards and use all of the latest hardware features.

      Nobody is buying $3K cards to play video games, they are using them to solve engineering problems, video games are just a convenient way to benchmark performance that is easily understood by laymen.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    7. Re:So glad it's over by mwvdlee · · Score: 2

      Standard consumer goods practice; always make sure you have atleast one ridiculously expensive version.
      Doesn't need to be any better, just far more expensive.
      There's always people who associate "expensive" with "good" and some can even afford it.
      Same goes for TV's, Hifi equipment, musical instruments, tools, sports equipment, cars, etc...

      --
      Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
    8. Re:So glad it's over by x0 · · Score: 3, Funny

      I doubt there exists or will ever exist more than a couple of hundred Titan-Zs IN THE WORLD.

      Am I the only one who read that in Jeremy Clarkson's voice?

      m

      --
      In the immortal words of Socrates, who said; 'I drank what?'
  2. Wrong premise by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    These cards should have been tested from the perspective of high performance computing or scientific application.

    1. Re:Wrong premise by SpankiMonki · · Score: 4, Insightful

      These cards should have been tested from the perspective of high performance computing or scientific application.

      I don't think nVidia would want that.

    2. Re:Wrong premise by Blaskowicz · · Score: 2

      Nvidia does let people use the full computing featureset and performance barring ECC memory on a GTX Titan. Memory capacity is high too (6GB) though now there's also GTX 780 with that amount..

      They have this hierarchy (based on virtually the same cards, but drivers and segmentation differ, in increasing price order)
      GTX 780 and 780 Ti (3GB or 6GB) < GTX Titan (6GB) < Tesla (w/ 5GB, 6GB or 12GB) < Quadro K6000 (12GB)

      That gives :
      - gaming and GPGPU, double precision FP artificially much slower
      - gaming and GPGPU, double precision FP at regular speed
      - GPGPU only, double precision FP at regular speed, ECC can be enabled (to number crunches for weeks and monthes on)
      - all features of inferior models plus the support for CAD and industrial/high end software plus the weird features (quad buffer stereo, and miscellaneous) though the driver is not really meant to be good in games.

    3. Re:Wrong premise by Nemyst · · Score: 4, Informative

      Um, no, if Nvidia didn't want that, they wouldn't give the Titans full double-precision performance in the first place. I'm thinking that aside from getting a few sales from overenthusiastic gamers, their main motivation for marketing this as a gaming card is so their compute customers don't stop buying Teslas.

    4. Re:Wrong premise by mlw4428 · · Score: 2

      You're absolutely right on that. They artificially lock out features that their higher-end non-gaming cards have (such as VT-d support, etc). Nvidia doesn't want YOU to use GTXs for computing or scientific applications...they want you to use cards like Tesla or Quaddro. In fact I bet the biggest difference between the GTX Titan Z and Telsa K40 is less price and more specific features. In fact when I looked the K40 was a bit pricier but was outranked in sheer performance (CUDA cores, pipelines, etc), but you can't virtualize GTX, it doesn't work with GRID computing, and a few other features.

  3. Quiet is important by i_ate_god · · Score: 4, Insightful

    don't underestimate the beauty of a quiet powerful computer.

    I won't buy a $3000 gpu anymore than I'll buy a $1500 one, but I did buy the GTX 780 over the cheaper but somewhat more powerful R9 250 solely on the basis of it being cooler.

    --
    I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
    1. Re:Quiet is important by SpankiMonki · · Score: 2

      GTX 780 over the cheaper but somewhat more powerful R9 250

      That's one heckuva typo. (I *hope* that's a typo)

    2. Re:Quiet is important by i_ate_god · · Score: 2

      yes, it was the 290, not 250, sorry.

      They were competing against each other, the amd card had slighter better bang for the buck but was reportedly quite hot and some boards were quite noisy.

      --
      I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
  4. crossfire/sli compatability by rogoshen1 · · Score: 2

    Do games these days typically take full advantage of such setups? I haven't really paid too much attention to gaming/hardware in the past few years, but it seemed as if support for dual GPU's was less than stellar.

    IE, the only true advantage was an increase in the memory available to apps -- computationally, very few games took advantage of the additional gpu.

    Has this changed, or (equally likely) I am completely off base on the state of afairs ?

  5. Wrong tests by gman003 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The Titan shouldn't be considered a top-end gaming card. It should be treated as a budget Tesla card - even at $3k, it's the cheapest card in Nvidia's lineup with full double-precision floating point performance (which no game uses, but is common for scientific computing, Tesla's market). And on tests using that, the single-gpu Titan and Titan Black outperform the 295X2 by a large amount. AT hasn't gotten to test a Titan Z yet, but you can tell it's going to wipe the floor with the 295X2.

    Yes, Nvidia advertised the original Titan as a super-gaming card, and to be fair it was their top-performing gaming card for a while. But once the 780 Ti came out, that was over, and since everyone expects a 790 dual-GPU gaming card to be announced soon, buying any Titan for gaming is a fool's choice.

    Nvidia seems to still be advertising it as a top-end gaming card, presumably trying to prove the old adage about fools and their money. It just comes off as a scam to me, but anyone willing to spend over a grand without doing some proper research probably deserves to be ripped off.

    1. Re:Wrong tests by sshir · · Score: 3, Informative
      Result of Nvidia's crippling DP floating point performance on mainstream graphic cards is people started to look for ways around this bullshit.

      Case in point: linear algebra libraries (like 80% of scientific computing). Basically people are modifying algorithms so that bulk of computation is done in single precision and then cleaned up in double. Those mixed mode algorithms often outperform pure DP ones even on non crippled cards (for example MAGMA library).

      People don't like to be screwed with...

    2. Re:Wrong tests by EvilSS · · Score: 2

      The Titan shouldn't be considered a top-end gaming card. It should be treated as a budget Tesla card - even at $3k, it's the cheapest card in Nvidia's lineup with full double-precision floating point performance (which no game uses, but is common for scientific computing, Tesla's market).

      This. For gaming there is virtually no difference between a 780 Ti (~$700) and a Titan Black (~$1000). They look identical on gaming benchmarks. I imagine that a pair of 780Ti's in SLI would outperform the Titan Z when it comes to gaming (the Titan Z is underclocked compared to the Titan Black) and for less than half the price.

      The difference is the unlocked floating point capability and added vram. The Titans are for number crunching. The TitanZ Crushes the AMD R9 295x2. Well, that and gamers looking for epeen cred.

      --
      I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
    3. Re:Wrong tests by Nemyst · · Score: 2

      Wait, in essence you're saying that by leveraging single-precision (which is still three times faster than double-precision even for Nvidia's compute cards) computations, libraries have been able to increase performance without compromising the quality of the results. How is that a bad thing, or people "getting screwed with"?

  6. 64Bit floating point and compute mode by Bleek+II · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The titian line in not a purely gaming GPU! The higher price comes for leveraging it's GPGPU CUDA technology. It's like buying a server hardware and complaining it doesn't run your games and well as an i7 which costs less. Game enthusiasts always ruin hardware news with their one golden spec, the frames per second! "That said it’s clear from NVIDIA’s presentations and discussions with the company that they intend it to be a compute product first and foremost (a fate similar to GTX Titan Black), in which case this is going to be the single most powerful CUDA card NVIDIA has ever released. NVIDIA’s Kepler compute products have been received very well by buyers so far, including the previous Titan cards, so there’s ample evidence that this will continue with GTX Titan Z. At the end of the day the roughly 2.66 TFLOPS of double precision performance on a single card (more than some low-end supercomputers, we hear) is going to be a big deal, especially for users invested in NVIDIA’s CUDA ecosystem." - AnandTech

  7. Re:$3,000?? by Luckyo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They don't. What they need this for is ghetto floating point development hardware. This is cheap by those standards and offers far more precision than consumer grade GPUs.

  8. Re:$3000 Bitcoin card by Luckyo · · Score: 2

    ASIC makers have done if for the government. GPU mining is a thing of the past.

    Prices still haven't come down though.

  9. People don't buy very high end video cards ... by perpenso · · Score: 2, Interesting

    People don't buy the highest performing video cards for gaming, they buy them mining virtual currency.

    Keep that in mind when you see that great price for a used high end card. The card probably ran for an extended period of time over clocked to just under its "melting point" and just got replaced by an ASIC miner.

  10. Re:$3,000?? by Luckyo · · Score: 2

    Double precision floating point hardware, designed to do things like physics simulation. This thing has no ECC and some other similar tradeoffs, so it's fairly cheap at only 3k.

    Here's an example of a non-ghetto version: http://h30094.www3.hp.com/prod...

  11. Re:3000? by synapse7 · · Score: 2

    Man I wish I could be that dumb.

  12. That was last year by dutchwhizzman · · Score: 2

    People that mine either mine scrypt style currencies that still run better on GPUs or they are using ASIC miners for at least a year already. Used high end cards are either NVidia which are sold because the gamer wants something new or is short on cash, or AMD when the owner wants a faster GPU for either gaming or scrypt coin mining. For scrypt coin mining on AMD, overclocking the GPU doesn't work, in general you have to clock down a bit unless you are lucky and you can overclock the memory enough to maximize output with the GPU at standard clock rates.

    The highest performing video cards tend to cost so much more for their performance, that miners get slightly less performing cards for half the price of the top of the range. You can get the R9 270 and R9 290 cards for much less money than the R9 290x and now the R9 295x2. The amount of coins you can mine for the purchase price and power consumption are such, that you don't want to buy those "highest performing video cards" if all you do is mine.

    The reason you can buy relatively new video cards from miners is because the prices fell after MtGox fell. The get rich quick thing didn't work out and they all need money to pay their power bills. These cards aren't burnt up technically, the miner's wallet is empty and he needs some way to recuperate part of his loss. Sure, some of those are highest end cards, because the miner didn't pay attention to the price/performance thing when he bought them, but most will be high in the midrange, especially since we've seen some new high end cards come out since the prices of crypto coins fell.

    --
    I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
  13. AMD fp64 rate by ponos · · Score: 3, Informative

    I would just like to point out that the 295X2 has superior absolute gaming performance and superior fp32 performance but, just like most gaming NVidia products, the fp64 is crippled at 1/8 fp32 rate at configuration in order to create a profit margin for the costlier "pro" products. The hardware itself is capable of 1/2 fp64 rate and should be superior to the Titan Z if AMD decides to offer "pro-level support".

    As proof, consider the fp64 rate of the single-chip AMD W9100, sold at ~$4000, which is 2.6 TFlops (http://www.amd.com/Documents/FirePro_W9100_Data_Sheet.pdf), versus the 2.7 TFlops of the Titan Z (1/3 fp32 rate, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...). AMD could unlock the 295X2 at its full potential 5.2 double precision TFlops and release it any day if they want, crushing the Titan Z.

    Honestly, instead of the Titan Z, I'd rather buy the AMD W9100 for $4000 and get equivalent double precision compute rate, better perf/W and, most importanty, certification for pro applications and ECC memory. That is certainly worth the extra $1000 in this product segment.

  14. You keep using that word... by gman003 · · Score: 2

    You're arguing with the antecedent. I'm saying "if you care about X, the Titan is good", and you're accusing me of cherry-picking because the Titan is bad at Y and Z, even though I specifically called it out as not being good for anything except X in a performance-per-penny measure.

    I am saying that one of the principal reasons to buy a Titan is if you have a heavy double-precision compute load. I then provided a benchmark showing that a Titan beats the 295X2 in such a load. It would be cherry-picking if I picked the one double-precision benchmark that showed the Titan in a good light, but a single-precision benchmark does not invalidate that.

    If you are accusing me of cherry-picking, please provide a benchmark that shows a 290X beating a Titan in a double-precision workload. AFAIK the only double-precision benchmark Anandtech uses is the F@H benchmark I linked to originally.

    I am not at all arguing that the results in the double-precision benchmark somehow invalidates the single-precision or integer results. If your workload isn't mostly double-precision, the Titan is not for you. But if your workload *is* mostly double-precision, the Titan is a viable card.