Radeon R9 295X2 vs Nvidia Titan Z

[raunak62]

The Titan Z is said to have a better compute performance while Radeon R9 295X2 has a better gaming performance. AMD always have some cool cards when it comes to gaming. Also I'm an AMD fan, so my answer is going to be biased 😛

From the reviews I've read the Titan Black is only about 1/10th better at compute and the 290x is the winner in games. I've owned 5 AMD cards so far and the biggest issue I've had with them is listening to all the excuses and whining from the Nvidia fanboys every time AMD bests them. It's not only annoying, but It's tiring as well.

The new Titan Z may beat the Radeon R9 295X2 by a small margin and maybe not (I really don't care). When Nvidia can beat it at a similar price point I'll concede. Until then AMD IS KING!___ PERIOD!! :lol:

My thoughts xactly 😛 at half the price, AMD really bags the match

 

[Memhorder]

I'm not sure the cooling solution is that great for the Titan Z. I mean. For hours of heavy use I think AMD's closed loop will fair better than the single fan blower. And 2 Titan Blacks would be cheaper than the Z which doesn't make sense on NVIDIA's part. I guess the real question is "do you really really want it?" I'm sure the Z would out perform but once the card starts cooking the AMD will maintain. Cleaning that RAD would be easier too. You'd really have to buy aftermarket. IDK I think I would do the AMD 295x and build a second computer with the leftovers

 

[mordorrson]

Both cards are going to give almost the same performance, but AMD is giving a much better price/performance option.

R9 295x2 = $1410
R9 290X (x2) = $1000

That's (roughly) $400 for the cooling system, but considering that it does an excellent job of cooling the card, and shouldn't require much, if any maintenance, that's not too bad.

Titan Z = $3000
Titan Black (x2) = $2040

That's an extra $950 for... what? The privilege of owning an overpriced card that's misrepresented as a gaming series card?

The Titan Black itself was overpriced and put into the wrong category. That DP feature doesn't mean anything in gaming. It's a little ridiculous to consider anything besides a 780 ti or 290X if you want the highest end single card performance for a decent price. The real question for this thread should be: Why does Nvidia think they can charge you 25-50% more for a card that gives you a maximum of 15% better performance, and only on games that are optimized for their cards?

 

[RussK1]

I wouldn't spend $3000 on a single card let alone $1,500 but being fair. nVidia gets away with charging a premium because they actually plan on providing driver support. AMD is lethargic in this area and the saying "you get what you pay for" applies here.

I am an owner of multiple systems ----> Intel/AMD - AMD/AMD - Intel/nVidia, etc and while AMD makes some great products their drivers suck. From the USB filter drivers to display drivers... it's old. The redundancy of uninstalling and reinstalling drivers is old, the stutter is... RAGE inducing!

 

[smeezekitty]

AMD driver problems are greatly exaggerated. It doesn't matter since they are both functional and $3000 is just absurd

 

[flashbond]

The TITAN Z is basically two TITAN BLACKs in SLI while the R9 295X2 is two R9 290Xs in crossfire. This means that the TITAN Z is the most powerful GPU out of the two. The reason the AMD is said to be the fastest on the market is because the TITAN Z is not out yet.

So basically the Nvidia one is more powerful, but the AMD one gives you better bang for your buck.

Good point!

 

[Someone Somewhere]

However, the 295X2 is OCed 290X chips, while the Titan Z is (probably) underclocked compared to the Titan Black. Need reviews.

 

[Eduello]

Yeah, it's hard to say anything at this point; This entire thread is just speculation.

 

[mordorrson]

Nvidia did say the card has about 8 TFLOPS of compute power, which puts the clock speeds at a little more than 700Mhz

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Titan Black is 889 boost to 980MHz. That's a pretty major step down, about 15%.

Given that at stock the 290X is only very slightly slower than the Titan Black, I'd say the AMD one is probably going to be somewhat faster.

 

[Eduello]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-S15L3dHA

Just throwing this out there...

 

[Someone Somewhere]

705MHz boost to 876. That answers that question. AMD FTW.

 

[Eduello]

Yep, looks like AMD will be the king of dual GPUs, at least until the GTX 790 comes out (which will hopefully be able to challenge the R9 295X2).

 

[Someone Somewhere]

I somewhat doubt it'll be much difference to a Titan Z, except possibly with worse FP64 performance.

 

[Denis Stoikovski]

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/introducing-nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan-z

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Oh, wow. They screenshotted the marketing images. Complete with 'you spelled it wrong' red wiggly lines...

 

[GPUEnthusiast]

For applications that require the Titan Z's wicked amount of double precision floating point performance (2316 Gigaflops versus the R9 295x2's 1408 Gigaflops) that's where the Titan Z would excel over the R9 295x2. Make no mistake, because of the GeForce GTX branding, the Titan Z is a GAMING GPU, not a workstation GPU. If it were a workstation GPU it would be part of their Quadro line.
Here's some statistics about each card that I assembled:

Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan Z:
Stream Processors: 2x2880
Texture Units: 2x240
ROPs: 2x48
Core Clock: 706 MHz
Boost Clock: 876 MHz
Memory Clock: 7GHz GDDR5
Memory Bus Width: 2x384 bit
VRAM: 2x6GB
FP64: 1/3 FP32 Floating Point Performance: Singe Precision: 8150 Gigaflops. Double Precision: 2316 Gigaflops
TDP: 375W
Width: Triple Slot
Transistor Count: 2x7.1B
Manufacturing Process: TSMC 28nm
Launch Date: 05/28/14
Launch Price: $2999

AMD Radeon R9 295x2
Stream Processors: 2x2816
Texture Units: 2x176
ROPs: 2x64
Core Clock: Unknown (rumored to be 892 MHz)
Boost Clock: 1018 MHz
Memory Clock: 5GHz GDDR5
Memory Bus Width: 2x512 bit
VRAM: 2x4GB
FP64: 1/8 FP64 Floating Point Performance: Single Precision: 11264 Gigaflops. Double Precision: 1408 Gigaflops.
TDP: 500W
Width: Triple Slot
Transistor Count: 2x6.2B
Manufacturing Process: TSMC 28nm
Launch Date: 4/21/2014
Launch Price: $1499

In conclusion, with the gaming performance that I've seen on both cards on YouTube and judging by the numbers above. I believe that the Titan Z is a low power way of having a high compute performance and gaming performance card.
The Titan Z would be ideal for somebody who does graphical and special effects work, but also is a video game enthusiast, and doesn't want to get a massive power supply to support 2 x R9 295x2's or 4 x GTX 780 Ti's. In my honest opinion, if you're a hard core gamer, for the price, I would look into either getting two 780 Ti's SLI'd or a single R9 295x2. I won't try to sugar coat it any longer... for the price... the R9 295x2 kicks the Titan Z's ass when it comes to gaming, it is a pure bred gaming GPU. The interesting thing is that the R9 295x2 has a MUCH higher single precision performance, which is strange. For half the price, it does everything almost as well (90% the performance as the Titan Z).

The R9 295x2 is an amazing card, and I'm very unbiased. I have owned a myriad of AMD and Nvidia GPU's. The only downside to the R9 295x2 is the TPD of the card. The 500 Watt TPD requirement is quite high. You can't beat an integrated closed circuit water cooler though. In terms of price/performance ratio, the Titan Z gets slayed pretty hard by AMD's R9 295x2. I'm currently not seeing a market for the Titan Z besides people with money coming out of their ears who want an in between of both worlds. A graphic designer, or somebody running servers would go with Nvidia's Quadro series, or AMD's Firepro series. An enthusiast gamer would go for dual GTX 780 Ti's or the AMD R9 295x2. In short, the R9 295x2 is not better than the Titan Z at a 3000 dollar price point, but since the sticker price is 1499, then the R9 295x2 slays it

 

[nikoli707]

^ what he said.

neither of these cards are effective for a gamer in no way unless you are trying for extreme performance in a mini itx platform. they have crappy pcb's, there will likely never be an effective waterblock, and their a likely too high of an asics rated chip that you would never be able to get the core voltages high enough to provide 1.6ghz 24/7/365 stable for real 4k performance. just get 2 kingpins or 2 vaporx 290x's

 

[spartaman64]

the gtx titan z costs about the same as 2 r9 295x2s and it just released today and apparently it takes up 3 slots i have no idea what nvidia is playing at

 

[mordorrson]

^ what he said.

neither of these cards are effective for a gamer in no way unless you are trying for extreme performance in a mini itx platform. they have crappy pcb's, there will likely never be an effective waterblock, and their a likely too high of an asics rated chip that you would never be able to get the core voltages high enough to provide 1.6ghz 24/7/365 stable for real 4k performance. just get 2 kingpins or 2 vaporx 290x's

Umm, the 295X2 has an extremely effective closed loop cooling system, you don't need a separate water block to replace that unless you want to keep the thing iced. Also, a 12 inch card probably wouldn't be very compatible with a mini itx platform, you need a bigger case than what you can put on a mini itx; and both cards should be able to keep 30+ FPS on 4k gaming, which isn't bad at all. Not sure about frame latency, but benchmarks don't lie, so it couldn't be terrible.

 

[CAaronD]

Wow, my eyes are hurting from reading all these comments. Here I am with my integrated Intel HD

 

[Someone Somewhere]

You read through all of them?

EDIT: Wait, wrong thread. I thought this was the several thousand comment Best GPUs for the money comments.

 

[CAaronD]

Was it a Tomshardware crime to post that? 😛 Is this thread supposed to be locked Mr Mod? ^_^

 

[CAaronD]

Well my opinion is the R9 295x2 still beats the Titan Z in price to performance ratio. Titan Z was just released today.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Post what?

We still have plenty of people using iGPUs. Not everyone games seriously, or has large amounts of money.