Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X review

Nvidia has maxed out its Maxwell graphics architecture and this is the result: the Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X. The most powerful consumer GPU we've ever seen.

Brilliant. That means, once again, we can trot out the familiar "fastest graphics card ever" headline, right?

Well… no. There's actually a bit of a distinction between the fastest single GPU and the fastest graphics card – the two do not necessarily mean the same thing. But we'll come to that in a bit.

What we do have here though is a brand new "ultra enthusiast," super-expensive, $999 graphics card. Think Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition CPU,Apple Watch Edition or Audi R8 and you'll be on the right path.

But where the Audi really needs a race track to show its full worth, the Apple Watch Edition needs a millionaire who doesn't get out much, and the 5960X can't shine without rare complex number-crunching algorithms, the Titan X will deliver impressive gaming performance at almost any level.

Like all the other Titan cards Nvidia has released over the last three years, this is a card for gamers who want the best gaming experience possible and don't mind paying for it.

But it's also a card designed to be an object of desire. This is an aspirational piece of hardware, likely to be much wanted but less purchased by the average PC gamer.

The Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X is a headline-grabber, a card built to showcase the Maxwell GPU tech and hopefully convince the more money-conscious to spend their GPU upgrade cash on one of the more affordable Maxwell-powered graphics cards.

The trickle-down effect is real here, because the GTX Titan X is using the same overall GPU design. However, it's also throwing many more cores and a lot more memory at the gaming problem to deliver seriously impressive frame rates.

And the target for those metrics? Nvidia has 4K gaming at peak settings firmly in its sights for the GeForce GTX Titan X. And, for the most part, this card is very accomplished at delivering on that lofty ambition.

The beating heart of the Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X is the brand new GM 200 GPU at its core. This is what I mean by the full power of the Maxwell architecture – it's the biggest GPU core around, packing in 50% more processing tech than the GM 204 silicon in the GTX 980.

And the Titan X is housing the full GM 200 core too.

With the first Titan card Nvidia left some of the top Kepler core on the test bench, chopping out a few SMX units here and there, and other chunks of its full core configuration, to ensure it could hit the yields necessary on its big chip. It took another year for Nvidia to release the GTX Titan Black, rocking the full implementation of the GK 110 GPU.

This time around though both Nvidia's 28nm production process and its Maxwell architecture are mature enough for it to be able to confidently produce such complex 601mm2 slices of super-powered silicon with good yields.

And boy, is it complex.

Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X specifications

GPU GM - 200
Lithography - 28nm
Transistor count - 8 billion
Die size - 601mm2
SMM units - 24
CUDA cores - 3,072
Texture units - 192
ROPs - 96
Base clock - 1,000MHz
Boost clock - 1,075MHz
Memory capacity - 12,288MB GDDR5
Memory bus - 384-bit
Memory clock - 3,505MHz
TDP - 250W

That massive GPU contains a full 3,072 CUDA cores and around eight billion transistors. Putting that in context the GTX 980 has almost three billion fewer transistors while AMD's top GPU, the Hawaii XT, is rocking around two billion fewer.

Those CUDA cores are split between 24 streaming microprocessors (SMMs) with 192 texture units and an unprecedented 96 render output units (ROPs).

Chances are though there's another number which has piqued your interest surrounding the Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X and that's the enormous 12GB frame buffer.

Running across the same aggregated 384-bit memory bus as the original Titan cards, but including Maxwell's new memory compression algorithms, its memory configuration provides a welcome level of future-proofing to Nvidia's top consumer GPU.

Those 12,288 megabytes of speedy GDDR5 memory might look like overkill right now, but back when the first Titan hit the desktop its 6GB frame buffer looked stupidly large. And now we've got Shadow of Mordor filling out around 5.7GB with its high-res texture pack running at 4K ultra settings.

The chunky frame buffer is also likely one of the reasons the green team has decided to remove double precision processing from this iteration of the GTX Titan. Previous Titans all had full double precision floating point calculation enabled, but this is the first to have that pro-level feature blocked.

Given the huge frame buffer on the GTX Titan X we'd guess there was a certain concern it might cannibalise more Quadro sales than in previous iterations. And unsurprisingly there's going to be a new GM 200 Quadro launched around the same time as this latest Titan.

However, Nvidia has also said most of the Titans doing the professional grunt work in institutions were only using single precision floating point calculations anyway. But that lack of DP does make the GTX Titan X a resolutely gaming card rather than a professional level option.

Benchmarks

DirectX 11 1600p synthetic performance

Heaven 4.0 - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X - (26) 58
AMD R9 295X2 - (23) 66
Nvidia GTX Titan Black - (18) 40
Palit GTX 980 - (22) 42
Sapphire R9 290X 8GB - (17) 34

DirectX 11 4K synthetic performance

Heaven 4.0 - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X - (15) 27
AMD R9 295X2 - (14) 30
Nvidia GTX Titan Black - (13) 20
Palit GTX 980 - (11) 20
Sapphire R9 290X 8GB - (10) 17

DirectX 11 1600p gaming performance

Bioshock Infinite - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X - (15) 100
AMD R9 295X2 - (20) 102
Nvidia GTX Titan Black - (9) 74
Palit GTX 980 - (16) 81
Sapphire R9 290X 8GB - (15) 59

GRID 2 - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X - (103) 134
AMD R9 295X2 - (99) 134
Nvidia GTX Titan Black - (69) 86
Palit GTX 980 - (86) 107
Sapphire R9 290X 8GB - (71) 90

DirectX 11 4K gaming performance

Battlefield 4 Ultra - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X - (31) 48
AMD R9 295X2 - (13) 60
Nvidia GTX Titan Black - (18) 31
Palit GTX 980 - (24) 36
Sapphire R9 290X 8GB - (17) 30

Shadow of Mordor Ultra - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X - (38) 48
AMD R9 295X2 - (36) 57
Nvidia GTX Titan Black - (26) 33
Palit GTX 980 - (25) 34
Sapphire R9 290X 8GB - (18) 36

Metro Last Light - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X - (14) 20
AMD R9 295X2 - (12) 27
Nvidia GTX Titan Black - (7) 14
Palit GTX 980 - (13) 17
Sapphire R9 290X 8GB - (11) 14

Peak temperature performance

Battlefield 4 - Degrees Centigrade: lower is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X - 83
AMD R9 295X2 - 75
Nvidia GTX Titan Black - 83
Palit GTX 980 - 76
Sapphire R9 290X 8GB - 69

Peak platform power draw

Battlefield 4 (1600p) - Watts: lower is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X - 373
AMD R9 295X2 - 681
Nvidia GTX Titan Black - 353
Palit GTX 980 - 335
Sapphire R9 290X 8GB - 361

Overclocked 4K gaming performance

Heaven 4.0 - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X OC - (17) 32
AMD Radeon R9 295X2 - (14) 30

Battlefield 4 - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X OC - (34) 55
AMD Radeon R9 295X2 - (13) 60

Shadow of Mordor - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X OC - (42) 56
AMD Radeon R9 295X2 - (36) 57

Metro Last Light - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is better
Nvidia GTX Titan X OC - (15) 24
AMD Radeon R9 295X2 - (12) 27

Our GPU test rig is a stock-clocked Intel Core i7-4770K on an Asus Maximus VI Hero Z97 motherboard with 8GB of 1,600MHz DDR3.

Verdict : 

So no, the Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X can't call itself the fastest gaming graphics card available right now. That's because of the continued impressive performance of AMD's top-end R9 295X2 card.

The AMD Radeon R9 295X2 is still the fastest graphics card in terms of gaming, offering higher average frame rates in the latest titles at 4K resolutions. And if average frame rates were the whole story, you could happily conclude that the cheaper AMD card is a much better purchase than this pricey Titan X.

But they're not.

The Radeon is able to achieve its performance with its last-gen, soon-to-be-second-tier GPUs, because it's using two of them to power one card. It's a CrossFire setup on a single slice of circuit board. That's impressive, but it introduces a whole host of problems that the resolutely single GPU Titan X doesn't have to worry about.

For a start there's the power draw. The GeForce GTX Titan X only requires a 600W PSU in your PC where the R9 295X2 simply wouldn't cope under such restrictive power offerings.

On our test rig the Radeon draws a hefty 681W under 1600p gaming load, so ideally you're looking for a 1KW PSU for that monster.

That energy requirement also means it demands a closed-loop water cooler attached to both AMD GPUs to keep it cool enough to run at its rated speeds. And that takes a whole lot of space. The GTX Titan X could happily fit into a mini-ITX chassis, and still deliver a frighteningly powerful micro machine.

Then there are the vagaries of multi-GPU gaming. You can't always trust twin GPUs to deliver the performance you've paid for – we'd always recommend spending your graphics money on the fastest single GPU you can afford. Splitting the cash over two cards might net you some improvements in average frame rates, but often you'll be sacrificing smooth gaming to that particular god.

Multi-GPU setups can suffer from the dreaded micro-stutter. This is where the overall performance seems good, but the actual experience rings hollow as visible stutters interrupt the smooth running of your games.

You will also come across situations where, having picked up a game on launch day, you find at least one of your GPUs is sat twiddling its thumbs while you wait for the devs to update support for either SLI or CrossFire.

Such experiences are infrequent, and becoming even more so. We've run both AMD and Nvidia multi-GPU setups in the labs for years and things are definitely getting better, especially on day one performance. But still, a powerful single GPU will always be preferable to a less-trustworthy twin-GPU setup.

So, it's a similar situation to when the inaugural GTX Titan was released.

Back in 2013 we already had the GTX 690, with its twin GK 104 GPUs delivering speedy gaming performance. The first Titan fell a little short in terms of average frame rate but was able to offer a more elegant, efficient solution in a single GPU package.

The only difference today is that the GTX Titan X's competition is coming from AMD and not from within its own stable of cards.

The competition

With no single GPU competition from AMD (thanks to the tardy nature of the upcoming but still far off Fiji silicon in its Radeon R9 390X), Nvidia has almost been given a free pass with the GeForce GTX Titan X.

It's the fastest single GPU card around and delivers almost the same level of gaming performance as the dual-GPU behemoth from AMD, with more elegance and more efficiency.

Which means that Nvidia can easily charge this much cash simply for the privilege of owning a GeForce GTX Titan X.

That could change when the Radeon R9 390X turns up, with its touted $700+ price tag and high bandwidth memory configurations, but until then the GM 200 core in the Titan X stands alone.

Even so, this won't be the only consumer graphics card to rock the GM 200 GPU from Nvidia. There is almost certainly going to be a GeForce GTX 980 Ti released soon after AMD finally gets its R9 390X out of the door in the Summer.

We're betting on an August release for the GTX 980 Ti.

We liked

The GeForce GTX Titan X is an ultra desirable component. The fact it is able to produce the same level of gaming performance as the top dual-GPU AMD card is important, but what puts it in a league of its own is its ability to do that with half the power draw and without needing a full closed-loop water cooler.

I'm also rather stunned by the overclocking performance of our reference sample.

The Maxwell architecture tends to welcome a little light clock tweakery, but it's the fact it has such a bearing on gaming performance that really impresses. The mid-range GTX 960's GPU could be boosted by a huge amount, but it didn't really translate into much in the way of frame rate improvements.

That couldn't be further from the truth with the GM 200 and GTX Titan X.

I was able to close the gap between Titan X and R9 295X2 to almost indistinguishable levels with some easy tweaks, knocking the GPU up over 1,400MHz and the memory clock up to around 3,900MHz.

We disliked

Nvidia has dropped an unwelcome colour change on the latest Titan. The aluminium shroud of the original Titan was a total departure from the black plastic covers of previous Nvidia cards. This back to black aesthetic makes it look like the Titan's cheaper cousin to us.

But for an internal component that's close to an irrelevance.

What's of more consequence is the amount of money Nvidia is asking you to pay out for a GTX Titan X. At $999 it's prohibitive, not quite as bad as the GTX Titan Z, but still pretty damned high. But this is a top-of-the-line card, and a top-of-the-line price is part of the package.

Then there's gaming performance. Sure, it's the absolute fastest single gaming GPU on the planet, but it's by no means an unprecedented performance. There are still cheaper graphics cards around capable of delivering on the overall gaming speed, if not quite on the same elegant experience.

Verdict

Let's be honest, most of you reading this are not going to buy a GeForce GTX Titan X. It's simply too much money to spend on a single component for your average enthusiast.

But we're pretty sure you want one. You definitely should want one.

It's the fastest single GPU card around – an elegant, efficient package offering performance previously seen only in monstrously power-hungry dual-GPU cards.

It's the standard bearer for Nvidia's Maxwell architecture and shows just how far ahead of AMD its engineering teams are right now. Once they hit the 20nm process, the performance per Watt levels of these green cards is going to be enormous.

The only reason not to buy this powerful card is the price, but with a price this high, that's going to be a very compelling reason to a lot of people. If you're one of them, don't worry: there will surely be a more affordable GM 200-powered card rocking up before the end of the year.