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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.

13 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 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.
    3. 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 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.

  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...
  4. 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...

  5. 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

  6. 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.

  7. 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.