 So what is Titan actually for if not high resolution gaming such as the kind that you would do if you had triple monitors. So our triple monitor setup for testing Titan was actually three 1920 by 1200 monitors. So for all intents and purposes our results are going to be pretty similar to what you'd see running three 1080p monitors. It's a little bit more demanding but you can kind of extrapolate down a little bit and it gives you some idea how this solution is going to perform. So the Titan's main advantage when running high resolution is that it has 6 gigs of video memory. In addition to the 2500 some odd CUDA cores, the large 7.1 billion transistor GPU and just generally overall beast design. Ours ran at 1.13 gigahertz or so consistently with GPU boost. That's on air cooling. With water cooling it'll do more. So it's got a lot going for it. But what it doesn't have going for it is the fact that it is only one GPU and it does have to go up against competing dual GPU solutions. So the main contenders for this one actually well all the solutions that we ran were the GTX Titan, the ASUS Ares II. So this is a dual 7970 gigahertz edition card that actually is a very very very custom card. Very expensive but we used that to represent 7970 Crossfire as well as just sort of that you know what graphics card out there actually costs more than a Titan. Well this one and you know see how see how those stack up against each other. We ran a single 7970 with its 3 gigs of video memory 7970 all often often often gets recommended over GTX 680 for surround setups. And last but not least we ran two GTX 660 Ti's and SLI to see how these are two gig cards only to see how those stack up just having more GPU power. And actually last that one wasn't last we ran a GTX 680 so that's a 3 gig card so that gives us some idea how that rather 2 gig card excuse me. So that gives us some idea how these still high performance similar to a 7970 but more frame buffer limited cards will perform. So without further ado this is all on our 3930K at 4 gigahertz test bench with 16 gigs of RAM and all cards are overclocked. You can find the card over clocks in the shared Google document that I share so that you guys can see what our cards are clocked at. They're all at very reasonable clocks that should be attainable by you pretty much pretty easily. Alright so let's start with crisis. Can it run crisis? Ha ha ha ha. The joke that never gets old on the internet until it takes an arrow to the knee and dies or retires or does whatever it does. That's funny right and planking. Planking is still funny. I don't know. Forget about it. So crisis. Okay advantage Aries 2. The Aries 2 absolutely walks away with crisis. Crisis is an older game so the textures are not as not high resolution enough that Titan would benefit from its 6 gigs of video memory. So Aries 2 goes yeah okay we want more GPU horsepower also excellent crossfire scaling helps the Aries 2 perform more than twice as well as a 7970. Something that early on in my crossfire testing days I would have said oh that's an anomaly. There's no way that can be possible. You know what sometimes it actually happens. It's very very bizarre. So for single GPU solutions 680 and 7970 are pretty close. Again no advantage for the 7970 with its 3 gigabyte frame buffer. But the Titan leaves them both behind outperforming them both by about 50%. 660 Ti SLI demonstrates why sometimes a dual GPU solution is not a great one. So while Titan may be very expensive sometimes it can be worthwhile to run a single GPU because driver issues can force an otherwise theoretically more powerful solution to not really do very well. Now we just saw crisis 3 launch so we also ran crisis 3 where Titan stole the show. So Titan outperformed everything else in crisis 3 including the 660 Ti's and SLI although it should be noted that 660 Ti's and SLI are significantly less expensive than a Titan destroyed the GTX 680 destroyed the Aries 2 which actually performed worse than the 7970. So this is an example where 660 Ti demonstrated that it's all about drivers. So on our previous game crisis 1 AMD benefited from dual GPU while Nvidia didn't at all and in crisis 3 Nvidia benefits from dual GPU at 5760 by 1080 or rather by 1200. Well whereas AMD doesn't at all so it comes down to the individual games you're going to play whereas a single GPU solution always performs well and we see that with the Titan. Far Cry 3. Another hot title Aries 2 just runs away with this one. Far Cry 3 generally runs better on AMD cards and that trend continued and nothing really unexpected here. It performs almost twice as fast as a single 7970 and it takes the GTX 660 Ti's and SLI to even I mean they're not even close. GTX 660 Ti's and SLI are only slightly faster than a Titan which is significantly faster than GTX 680 and 7970 but you can see the AMD optimizations that have gone into this particular game. Skyrim was an interesting one. This is a bit of a challenge with surround gaming in general. Game support is not always there even for games that are extremely moddable so Skyrim is very moddable. Our stock test configuration for Skyrim has 18 mods installed from Steam Workshop. But it didn't actually work on either our Nvidia or our AMD test platforms to get it going in surround. There was a patch that used to work but then there's a newer patch of Skyrim now it doesn't work anymore. So I'm really excited about 4K displays. One to help us really push these GPUs because that's even higher resolution than 3x1080. And the other is the fact that we don't have to deal with surround to get just super high resolution images and higher pixel density is another good thing as well. Moving right along to Battlefield 3 Titan steals the show again just narrowly edging out 660Ti SLI by about 5% which beat Ares 2 as well. So this is a game that sort of like Far Cry 3 was for AMD. This one favors Nvidia pretty immensely. So GTX 680 walks all over 7970 and then the dual GPU solutions do the same thing to each other that the single GPU solutions did to each other with only the Titan sort of emerging on top. And I mean you look at the GPU that the dual GPU scaling actually AMD scales well but didn't have great performance to begin with. Whereas Nvidia didn't scale quite as well but had better performance to begin with. Next up is Metro 2033 which is the first game where we really see the higher frame buffer GPUs pull away from the lower frame buffer GPUs. So the 680 and the 660Ti both look like they ran out of memory because the performance just falls off a cliff compared to where they were hanging with their equivalent solutions throughout most of our testing. So while we don't necessarily need all 6 gigs that you have on the Titan for this particular bench it does show that there are modern games or even older games that at higher resolutions like when 4K displays start showing up will benefit from more memory. So yeah 3 gigs is enough for this particular game but what if we did scale to 4K? What if you know what if an upcoming title scales to 4K? Maybe 6 gigs will be needed in the near future especially if you want to run at the very very highest details. I mean I guess needed is sort of a strong word but anyway in this one Aries 2 steals the show. Titan comes in exactly where it belongs and moving on to Witcher 2. So Witcher 2 made that point again. This was the first game that we encountered where it looks like with uber sampling on. So we were running on the ultra preset including uber sampling none of the cards were actually even able to run the game in surround except for GTX Titan. Now on the AMD cards that's partly due to the fact that CD Projekt Red does not allow AMD configurations to run in iFinity in their surround setup. And that's for whatever reason that they decided to unimplement that because there was a hack at some point and then they turned it off for whatever reason. But neither of the other Nvidia solutions were even able to launch the game. So this is one where we are actually benefiting from not only the horsepower of Titan but also the huge frame buffer. And this brings into the picture how Titan is intended to be used. So it's low noise, it's relatively small for a high performance GPU. I mean it's 10.5 inches which is I guess pretty big but it's not the biggest GPU ever made that's for sure. And it is quiet so you can either put it in a small high performance system or you can take a bunch of them and stack them together. Witcher 2 scales extremely well even up to 3-way SLI. We've shown this in the past with GTX 660 Ti's. So what that means is you can take a few of these guys, you could probably eek out around 45 to 50 FPS with Witcher 2 at 5760 by 1080 ultra preset and have enough video memory to do it. So it's a very unique solution that way, a very futuristic solution that way. Although maybe not necessarily the most cost effective one. Thank you for checking out our video on surround gaming with the latest high end GPUs. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.