 Large format high-res monitors. This is the 30-inch monitor that we used to get our 2560 by 1600 or 1600p performance results. You can consider these pretty close to what you'd get if you ran at 2560 by 1440. The difference actually isn't all that much. And we are all about the GeForce GTX Titan today. This is the fastest single GPU card bar none. So what that means is compared to dual GPU solutions such as the 660 Ti SLI that we also ran and the ASUS Ares II which we also ran, which basically amounts to two 7970 GHz edition cards, you will get consistently good performance. So somewhere between a single GPU and two GPUs because those ones rely on driver optimizations. One of the other things that's interesting about Titan from a large format and high resolution perspective is the fact that it has 6 gigs of GPU memory, which means not only will one Titan perform extremely well at high res, but several Titans will perform extremely well at high res. Titan seeks to do a few things. Keep acoustics low, keep temperatures reasonable, deliver outstanding performance, and do it all with one GPU and reasonable power consumption. So we're going to be analyzing some of those other things in other videos, and this video is focused on the performance at greater than 1080p resolution. I did a full 1080p review as well, and there's a 5760 by 1080 surround review as well. So let's have a look at Crysis. So Crysis was always a challenge. This is Crysis 1, by the way, not Crysis 2, and it continues to be a challenge. So our single GPU card, however, runs at almost 60 FPS average in Crysis 1 at 2560 by 1600. Crysis has officially been conquered. Crysis is at DirectX 10, very high presets, 8x MSAA with motion blur off. The only thing that beats the Titan in Crysis is the Ares 2. So that's the dual 7970 solution, and you can see that the Titan actually performs almost twice as well as a GTX 680. Part of this could be due to the fact that it has a much larger frame buffer, although I doubt it because Crysis only used up about 1 gig of VRAM, as the rest of it is probably due to the fact that it has about 2.6, or rather, 7.1 billion transistors with 2600 CUDA cores. So moving right along, yeah, Titan performs pretty well, but it's about the same as GTX 660 SLI, which starts to look like a pretty good value here. This is an example of how well-optimized SLI scaling and games that don't demand too much in terms of video memory can perform really well compared to the Titan at a lower price. Crysis 3 was just released, so this one is a very interesting case study. You can see here the Ares 2 demonstrates why sometimes dual GPU solutions are not the answer. The Titan tops the performance charts, beating out the 660 Ti SLI solution, but not by much, destroying the GTX 680 again, performing almost, well, not quite almost double, but 75% better than a GTX 680, with the Ares 2 actually coming in behind a single 7970. Now the reason for that can be any number of things. The Ares 2 uses a special driver because it's not a standard AMD card, so Asus has their own driver, so sometimes that can be a little bit behind in terms of optimization. It could be Crossfire profiles. I've seen online that people are finding better success with, you know, using random Crossfire profiles, but we were using the default ones. And yeah, so sometimes a dual GPU solution can perform the same as a single one or even worse, which is one of the reasons why I personally always recommend a single GPU solution when you can. However, when you look at the performance in this game, 660 Ti looks like a pretty good value, considering it performs 90% as well as a Titan, but actually costs about 65% as much, and you can also get 660 Ti's in 3GIG configurations. Far Cry 3, another high performance title, another high resolution result here. So the Ares 2 and 660 Ti SLI come out way ahead of any of the single GPU solutions. Probably the most impressive thing on this particular chart right here, I think Slick's waiting for a video card here, I have a 7970. Is the 7970 that I just handed Slick? The 7970 beats the GTX 680 by almost 30%, only losing to the only other single GPU card in our test, which is the Titan. And that was only by about 20%, so it takes a dual GPU solution, both Nvidia and AMD scaled incredibly well in this game, with Nvidia getting about, almost double the scaling, and AMD getting about, about 50-60% scaling, so that's very very very cool stuff to see. But, definite nod to AMD and definite nod to dual GPU solutions here. Again, a game where perhaps the 6GB frame buffer is not a benefit to the Titan. Skyrim, now Skyrim we're not running the same way we used to, we've added a whole bunch of mods, about 18 mods from the Steam Workshop, making it much more demanding than it is in its bone stock configuration, which is what we used to run. And that's part of the reason why when I used to show these performance graphs, you'd never really see any difference between the cards. Now that has all changed. The big winner here again is 660 Ti SLI, with Titan coming up next, GTX 680 coming up next, and the AMD cards bringing up the rear. So this is a game that seems to be better optimized for Nvidia, although that could be a function of the mods we're running actually running better on Nvidia. So we just selected mods that we thought looked really good, and kind of went from there. Battlefield 3, getting to be a bit of an older game, but still very telling. So the Ares 3, remember this one has 3GB per GPU, did I say Ares 3? I meant Ares 2, has 3GB of RAM per GPU. So once again, we're running into a situation where we don't need that 6GB yet, however as 4K resolution starts becoming more popular, or if you want to run Surround, that might be more of a factor. But when you don't need the extra RAM, more GPU horsepower seems to really work out for you. And in this particular game, the Ares 2 performed almost double as well as a single 7970, making it by far the ruler of the roost in Battlefield 3, best possible solution. You could get very similar results by using dual 7970s at a much more reasonable price as well, which is part of the reason that you shouldn't just completely ignore the Ares 2 on the graphs, because that solution is available for less than the cost of a Titan, not necessarily more. The Ares 2 actually costs about $500, $600 more than a GeForce GTX Titan. So the Titan comes in a tie with the 660 Ti SLI, which again is because we didn't need the VRAM, with the other two single GPU solutions bringing up the rear once again. Metro 2033 is a very interesting case study, excellent scaling, again double the performance of a single 7970 with the Ares 2, highlighting why dual GPU solutions are often very awesome. However, looking at the 660 Ti compared to the 680, we see why dual GPU solutions aren't always necessarily that great. Titan puts up a great showing, again just destroying the numbers from the GTX 680, beating it by about 50-60% here. Witcher 2 is the last game in our suite, and I made a bit of a mistake on the graph, but you guys won't know that because I'll fix it before I show it to you, so don't worry about it. So Witcher 2 at 1600p ultra preset, including uber sampling, really didn't give as much of an edge to the Titan as I had thought. Because Titan relies on lots of VRAM to separate itself from dual GPU solutions, Witcher 2 I thought would demand more VRAM because of the fact that we had uber sampling on, the Ares 2 pulls away from everything else in Witcher 2, just proving that sometimes just more GPU horsepower is better than more memory or a larger single GPU. However, the Titan does put up a pretty good showing, again tying the 660 Ti and beating the GTX 680 by about 50%. So what does all of this mean? It means that looking at current resolutions like 2560x1600, if you're only running a single monitor, you may actually not get a thousand dollars worth of benefit with a GTX Titan, especially when you compare it to solutions like two GTX 660 Ti's in SLI or two competing cards running in Crossfire. However, if you were to run a multi-way configuration, Titan would be the solution to go with, because running a multi-way configuration presumably you're running at a very high resolution, whether it's 4K or whether it's in surround, and that's where you'll hopefully start to benefit from the additional RAM. And the other situation where Titan starts to make sense is in a small form factor configuration. Ares 2 pulled a good couple hundred more watts from the power supply than Titan. That does show up on your power bill and that does affect both the heat output as well as the noise of your system. So Titan is a great solution if you're looking to build a compact gaming rig. So this is another situation where dual 660 Ti's might not make sense because you need at least four expansion slots to even fit those. So do you have to pay a premium for that single GPU, single card, high performance solution? Yes, but if you're trying to work within a confined space, if you're trying to get more VRAM, or if you're a professional who wants to make use of the fact that the double precision, floating point performance of this card is not crippled like it was on previous generation consumer models, then something like a Titan might make sense. Thanks for checking out this video. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.