Nvidia Titan X Pascal 12GB Review (Archive)

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cangelini

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Hey, it's your money :) If it's me, I'm going for the single-GPU solution and side-stepping the issues that are becoming more prevalent.
 

Sam Hain

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Looking at the benches... Keeping my 2-way Gigabyte GTX 980 Ti Extreme Gaming OC Edition Windforces (which I've OC'd +70 core/+400 mem comfortably and never break past 60* C under load BTW) until the next series/NV HBM cards roll out OR even take a gander at what the Red-Team can do; not partial as long as it (GPU) performs as advertised without issue(s).

I've yet, to date, to experience "Issues" with SLI in any title. If any anything, I've thoroughly enjoyed SLI and watching my frames explode while cranking up the settings all day long...
 

Bartendalot

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For those of us who are on the 980 ti, this makes a compelling case for the 1080 ti. Assuming it comes out at around $750, I can sell my current card for $350 then pay $400 for what looks like it will be over 50% performance improvement in most games.

The only questions left are when will we see the 1080 ti, and when are we expecting the 1100 series. HBM2 could really help as we get to this level of performance....
 

The-Hoff

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Very thorough review. I was unsure when I purchased my Titan X but it the results do look promising. I hope mine arrives very soon.
 

hannibal

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1080ti Expectations?
Well, 1080ti is same as 1070 is to 1080.
1080ti is cut down TitanX with gddr5 instead of gddr5+.
So it will be cheaper and it can clock higher, because it has less active metal in it.
So it will be somewhat slover than TitanX, but nonreference coolers can help it to narrow the cap. (we can compare custom 1070 to FE 1080 and see the same thing.
 

uglyduckling81

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Except no one is going to pay $350 for a used 980ti when you can get a 1070 for that much which beats it across the board. Your probably looking at $250 for a second hand 980ti at this point.
 

stairmand

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I'm glad you are thinking of dropping Project Cars from the list. I moved to a 1080 from my Fury X as I play it a lot on my Oculus, however the reasons they give for poor AMD benchmarks just don't stack up. They also claim to have never received any money from NVidia, despite the tracks being covered by NVidia advertising.
 

Co BIY

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"As a means of improving yields, Nvidia disables two of the processor’s SMs for its Titan X, bringing the board’s CUDA core count down to 3584. And because each SM also hosts eight texture units, turning off two of them leaves 224 texture units enabled."

Does that mean they deliberately disable two units (and the same two) as the diagram seems to indicate or does it mean that they expected that most chips will have two inoperative units after manufacturing ?
 

rush21hit

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Mar 5, 2012
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$1200...so, yield? Definitely yield...

So where does the perfectly working chip goes? Surely 1080Ti if ever released will not bear more stuff than this, rather than less.

Titan has always been the name people trust and more often than not; proven as being top dog within each gen. So nVidia will sell them as luxury stuff.
And as for this gen, you can't even bought an AIB for this thing anymore, you had to go to nVidia themselves.
 

ohim

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This card is only for bragging rights and has very little to no importance at all. Only a few Nvidia hardcore fans will ever buy such a product thus given the fact that the Ti version of w/e they have is usually just around the corner in terms of performance and at much lower costs.
 

DoDidDont

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May 27, 2009
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Great preliminary review Thanks!

I first read this on my mobile and thought I’d accidentally skipped to comments, but after reading a bit realised why the reviewer started off that way.

Other reviews I have seen so far start off the review and end the review on the basis that anyone buying a Titan X owns a Ferrari and lives in a 12 bedroom mansion, and that its all about class, but this is completely wrong and will only end up starting off bickering amongst readers, throwing the more money than sense insults at people that want/decide to buy Titan X.

In my option all the previous Titans were never really meant for the mainstream gamer, and more focused on people wanting an Quadro / Tesla alternative at an affordable price, that occasionally game. People targeted GTX Titan X owners after the 980Ti was launched, because it was a few FPS faster in some titles, mainly because the first reviews used old drivers and data for the GTX Titan X, and new for the 980ti that was optimised for Maxwell, but anyone interested in content creation, GPU rendering etc would choose the GTX Titan X over the 980ti because of the onboard memory, 4GB just isn’t enough for most professionals, so a few FPS was never going to sway the decision, but a few gamers and trolls turned it into a class war. Glad this reviewer underlined exactly what Titan X is, and its place in the market before starting off the review. A+++

There’s more to computing than just playing games, and the games you love so much, many of those game developers probably choose Quadro’s or Titans for the extra Vram….

I currently have 4x Older ( 2688 core) GTX Titans for GPU based rendering. I use 3ds Max and Iray, and usually have 3 or 4 large contracts every months from Industrial or architectural designers. At the end of each project I am asked to produce anything from 10 to 50 FHD images noise free, so that usually means around 10,000 iterations, per image otherwise clients complain about noise.

The old GTX Titans I have scale beautifully in Max and Iray I.e.
An interior architectural scene, FHD, 10,000 iterations.

1x GTX Titan = 60 mins
2x GTX Titans = 30 mins
3x GTX Titans = 20 mins
4x GTX Titans = 15 mins

So currently at the end of a project it can mean a few days worth of rendering, and long hours into the night if a client hits me with a last minute deadline, which they usually do.. Oh I’ve decided I want to show these designs to a client in a meeting in 2 days can you do it?? Aaaaahhhhh!! ( I have a life away from this workstation you know!!! )

So if the single precision numbers are correct for the new Titan X, and work out the same in real world use, it would bean cutting my render times down to a third, meaning less waiting for renders to complete before I can move on to the next view/ scene, and more room for new clients. The cards will pay for themselves in a few months, like the last ones did so not worried about the cost too much, although it will be painful seeing the figures disappear from my bank account, I was already expecting it. So its nothing to do with class, ( I don’t even own a car :- (( ) and definitely about good business sense, plus there’s the added bonus of having 4x Titan X for when (if ever : -((( ) I get the chance to game.

I was so tempted to hit the buy button yesterday, but didn’t, and I wont, at least for now. The reason is simple, HEAT. I currently have 4x dual slot cards sandwiched together in a large case modded to house extra fans, but fans can only go so far based on ambient temperature before the heat just keeps building up, and rendering at 100% load on 4x Titans gets hot fast, so before rendering I have to ramp up the fans to 85% especially in the summer to keep the cards around the 70c mark, so they don’t die on me after a few months/ years, had them over 3 years now, and touch laminated wood, they are still going strong, But I decided my next build would be 100% liquid cooled to get around this problem.

But what options do we have? To buy directly from Nvidia, limited to two ( although they sell 4-way HB bridges on the same page ) and only their standard cooling solution.

Until Titan X is let loose to the 3rd parties, and a hybrid or copper solution is on the market my 4x Titan X dreams are on hold, plus Autodesk and the Iray development team as always are slow to the starting line, and still waiting for Pascal support..

Apparently they are working on supporting and optimising for Pascal…

Ah well..

Will there be 3rd party solutions for Titan X in the near future?

If not, bad move Nvidia, consider the uses for this card and the heat they generate over long periods, there must be a liquid cooling solution for this card!

And what of the 1080ti? If AMD do launch a Titan X Killer later in the year, early next year, Nvidia will launch the 1080ti but with the full core count and at a cheaper price, and unlike the 980ti, it will have at least 8GB which is enough for most DCC work, ending up putting anyone that brought Titan X’s backs up the wrong way, and starting off the bickering again… Nvidia usually do this, always proving they could have launched the full core GP102 version a lot cheaper in the first place..

Looking forward to the productivity benchmarks!
 

chaosmassive

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In my humblest opinion, Nvidia release TITAN series card make an illusion that lower-tier card looks more compelling (its still very expensive though),
lets look at past abit
- First ever released GTX Titan based on GK110 for $ 1k, then followed by 780 Ti (half memory of GTX Titan) for 1/3 price (I wont include TITAN Z because its didnt make any sense in any under 'rational' scenario)
- and its was just feel like yesterday, GTX TItan X release for 1k, then followed by crippled GM200 chip GTX 980 Ti for 1/3 ish price

refer to this history above, I simply deduce that Nvidia will release GTX 1080 Ti sooner or later

after all Nvidia have nothing to lose, if consumer buy GTX Titan X(2016) then 'yay' for Nvidia, if not it'll serve as red carpet for incoming GTX 1080 Ti at lower price
 
Thanks a lot for adding DOOM and doing that small insight on Project cars.

The Titan X lands in a weird spot for gaming fellas, but it does deserve the Crown. Weird because it's faster, but by the amount of extra silicon it has, the gains could have been bigger. I guess the clocks couldn't go higher, so nVidia might have a hard time creating a 1080ti when the 1080 can close the gap against the Titan X (Pascal) with ease.

I will wait for the second part to see more, hopefully OC, for this card, because I can't really see where a "ti" version could land.

Cheers!
 

Gurg

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Appears to be the first single card for 4k with playable minimum FPS. Value wise I'll keep my current overclocked 980sli until the 1170s come out.
 
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