Nividia Titan

[dmike]

Just wanted to chime in with this as it had come up between a friend and I...

In the "research" and reading I've done on the Titan, specs aside, just looking at the performance, it seems that there is an obvious boost with CUDA apps based on rendering and such. But with DC projects I've yet to find any reliable data that puts the Titan anywhere near the price point.

I'm sorry, I can't remember where, but I found some benchmark with regard to Folding that had the Titan taking out WU about 10% faster than a GTX 580. If that's true, I have to say it's quite disappointing. Yes I know, hearsay, not evidence, just going by memory here Please someone confirm/correct me on this if you have the info.
Sure, the 580 is one of the best crunchers imo, but a $1k card that just barely outperforms is ridiculous.

Now with regard to gaming, my understanding is that the Titan shines, in many cases walking away from the 690 in performance with substantial leads depending upon titles/settings. My impression has always been that Kepler is a gaming based architecture first, and a cruncher as an after thought. Conversely, the Fermi chips pound for pound out crunch Kepler cards but won't live up to the gaming performance.

When I built my rig it was for gaming in mind. I found a good middle ground on price/performance to throw in 2x 660Ti cards. It's an excellent setup and I run all modern games and full specs without issue. OTOH, I have a secondary box with a single 550Ti in it that can knock out a WU just about as fast as one of the 660Ti cards does.

To me, the Titan is far from a Tesla. Just from what I've seen, the card is for gaming and will also excel at CUDA based rendering. It does not however seem to be the best or even a good choice for DC work though, and it seems that Nvidia's CUDA marketing is focused upon rendering apps as there seems to be no mention of DC work when they market these cards to us.

Edit;
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This is not all encompassing, but I wanted to point out some benchmark specs within Einstein with regard to performance. In this case, the Titan vs the GTX 580. Each system has 2 of each card.
The Titan first;
titaneinstein.JPG

Now the 580 setup;
580einstein.JPG

Discuss?

[John P. Myers]

Well the *ONLY* benefit to having a Titan is it's the best FP64 performance you'll get out of any Nvidia card, by far. FP32 results are ok, but not worth throwing $1k at, as you said. Of course this also only applies to projects that don't offer AMD GPU apps. There's never any reason to buy anything made by Nvidia if you can crunch using a Radeon. Primegrid is one example of a project where you must use Nvidia, however (i think only 1 app was adapted to AMD). The Titan would do some serious stomping here, as most Primegrid GPU apps require FP64 (100% requirement on all PSA CUDA apps). For milkyway, might as well stick with AMD since performance/$ is much more in your favor. For GpuGrid the boost from Titan's FP64 would be nominal, but still something. Since they give bonus points for returning completed WU's early, it may or may not have an effect there occasionally.

[dmike]

Hey John, I understand all of that. AMD exceeds in many ways. I'm just kind of looking at it from an upgrade perspective, i.e. Titan vs. what Nvidia already offers.

[John P. Myers]

Hey John, I understand all of that. AMD exceeds in many ways. I'm just kind of looking at it from an upgrade perspective, i.e. Titan vs. what Nvidia already offers.

Well if you need FP64, upgrading to a Titan is the way to go. If not, stick with the GTX 500 series - better at crunching than the 600 series, and also cheaper. If you do opt for the Titan, be aware the only other Nvidia GPU you can add to that computer is another Titan, due to the drivers. If you are also a gamer, as some of us are, a GTX 690 would get you better performance on average than a Titan for the same price, and will also be a faster cruncher than the Titan on FP32. However if you need FP64 you will be crippled with the 690. Or, for the same $1k, you could get an AMD 7990 (or 2 7970s) and excel at both FP32 and FP64. The decision would have to be made on your personal choice of projects/apps/games as i don't know what your preferences are

[dmike]

Thanks for that, John.

Yeah first and foremost I use my rigs for gaming so that has to be at the forefront of video card choices for me. The problem I have with the 690 is in it being a single card multi GPU setup which makes it a pass decision, for intricate details and reasons I won't bother boring you with at this time.

The next most important thing to me is CUDA rendering. I make videos in Sony Vegas and can say that GPU video rendering has been close to 500% faster for me on my setup. I love it.

Last in place is DC crunching. Considering these things, I pass on Fermi cards as Kepler are better gaming performers. The Titan does definitely shine with games, but by simply adding a third 660Ti, I'd actually be outperforming the Titan on games by a substantial amount. So from that perspective, on all fronts it's a pass decision.

I'm really surprised to see the lack of performance increase that the Titan has in most DC applications vs. the 580. As someone had mentioned earlier in this thread, Nvidia likes to rebrand cards and often new products are only marginally better than what they already have to offer. Really, the Titan is what the 690 should have been all along.

In summary I'm satisfied with my current setup and won't be upgrading any time soon. For games, My i7 3770 with 32GB RAM and 2x 660Ti is plenty good. When and if I do upgrade however, I just can't justify going for the Titan. If I were to upgrade today, hypothetically speaking, I'd go with simply adding the third 660Ti instead of a 690 or a Titan. Aside from the circumstances that you mention, for the cost of an additional 660Ti (about $300) I will have gaming and crunching performance that actually exceeds the Titan. Plus, when I'm done with the setup, I have 3 cards that can be put in other boxes to upgrade their aging components (I have two systems with a 550Ti and one with a GTX 260).

Of course it's not ideal to set out to have 3x mid range video cards, but from where I'm at now with 2 already, it makes the most sense cost/performance wise.

[John P. Myers]

Thanks for that, John.

Yeah first and foremost I use my rigs for gaming so that has to be at the forefront of video card choices for me. The problem I have with the 690 is in it being a single card multi GPU setup which makes it a pass decision, for intricate details and reasons I won't bother boring you with at this time.

Microstuttering perhaps? AMD is (far) worse with that than Nvidia, admittedly.

I'm really surprised to see the lack of performance increase that the Titan has in most DC applications vs. the 580. As someone had mentioned earlier in this thread, Nvidia likes to rebrand cards and often new products are only marginally better than what they already have to offer. Really, the Titan is what the 690 should have been all along.

Actually the Titan was originally supposed to be the GTX 680. The current 680 was supposed to be the 660Ti. What happened was Nvidia saw the 660Ti's performance was about the same as AMD's 7970 (in games), so the 660Ti was released as the GTX 680 for $500. Imagine those profits...

Anyway, if you check GFLOP specs on GPUs before making a purchase, or just out of curiosity, i'll explain something about why the 500 series is still great for crunching. Starting with the 600 series, Nvidia dropped the shader clock which ran 2x the core clock. This is why when you compare the GFLOPS of the 600 series to the 500 (or earlier) series, you must cut the rating for the 600 series card in half. Comparing a 600 series GPU to an AMD GPU is essentially even. The same will be true of the 700 series.

For example the 660Ti is rated at 2459.52 GFLOPS FP32. Divide by 2 and the actual DC performance is 1229.76 GFLOPS. The 560Ti is rated at 1311.7 GFLOPS making it several percentage points faster. And it costs less. And it has better FP64, but still crappy. Those numbers are based on reference speeds. On OC versions, the gap is a bit wider.

It does sound like you need to stick with Nvidia though for your specific uses. Just remember to keep your power bill in mind when adding so many mid-range cards to a system to meet the performance of a single high-end card. Also remember to subtract ~30% of the combined performance for 3-way SLI (Xfire as well) when making comparisons. It'll never scale linearly

[dmike]

Thanks again for that John.

Yeah, I'm aware of the difference with Kepler and Fermi when it comes to crunching. I've tried to explain some of these things to people that were touting the Kepler cards as the Fermi's replacement and could never get through to them. Then there were others that said that Kepler was a huge step backwards because they didn't perform as well as the Fermi in the 500 series. But, Kepler was not designed first and foremost with DC in mind. You're absolutely right, in that the 500 series is a much better performer with DC applications. With gaming though, the Kepler romps the Fermi series (and by a wide margin) and rightly so; it's what they were primarily designed for. It surprises me that the Titan is of Kepler architecture. I don't know enough about it to really understand why at this point, but I question with a card like that and nvidia touting CUDA as the need for it why they didn't just build a super awesome Fermi based card.

I did not know about the whole 680 was supposed to be the 660ti and such. Thanks for the info.

I'm not for the 690 but not because of microstuttering. I used to have the stutter with my 660ti sli setup but some evga patch eliminated it. Without going into great detail, I'll just say that sli on a stick has its issues. The 690 can be very finicky with certain motherboards and some apps don't like it much at all.

When looking at the 3 way SLI, I'm just looking at benchmarks with the setup, not trying to figure what boost I'll get by adding a third card. It's pretty surprising but on a lot of titles a 3 way 660Ti is beating out the Titan on frame rates by usually around 20%, but in some times (such as Battlefield 3) at times as much as 45%. Granted, it's 3 cards vs. 1 so pound for pound obviously the Titan is stronger, but for someone with my current setup I'm looking at getting above Titan performance in games for $300.

Electric bill is an issue that most have to contend with, but not me. Fortunately, my wife has all of our bills paid through her employment so we never even get an electric bill I feel guilty about it at times because we're not very green and should be making at least some attempt to conserve power, but instead we've got 4 systems running 24/7, multiple televisions, we grow tomatoes indoors... hehe we're just huge electricity consumers.

[John P. Myers]

Something to note:

Overclocking the Titan is ridiculously simple due to the characteristics of GPU Boost 2.0 which raises the boost clock above stock settings if the Titan feels the temps are low enough to do so.

Reference clocks for the Titan are 837MHz base and 876MHz boost. By doing *nothing* more than increasing the manual fan speed to the max setting of 85%, the Titan will settle in at 993MHz. This puts the Titan's rating at 5337 GFLOPS FP32 for a standard edition card. Of course it might be a bit loud with the fan that high If that bothers you, just pick up one of these EVGA Titan Hydro Coppers This would allow you to settle the Titan in at 1137MHz without even trying very hard, and would also be quiet. It would also push the rating to over 6100 GFLOPS, over a 33% increase from stock.

[zombie67]

Something to note:

Overclocking the Titan is ridiculously simple due to the characteristics of GPU Boost 2.0 which raises the boost clock above stock settings if the Titan feels the temps are low enough to do so.

Reference clocks for the Titan are 837MHz base and 876MHz boost. By doing *nothing* more than increasing the manual fan speed to the max setting of 85%, the Titan will settle in at 993MHz. This puts the Titan's rating at 5337 GFLOPS FP32 for a standard edition card. Of course it might be a bit loud with the fan that high If that bothers you, just pick up one of these EVGA Titan Hydro Coppers This would allow you to settle the Titan in at 1137MHz without even trying very hard, and would also be quiet. It would also push the rating to over 6100 GFLOPS, over a 33% increase from stock.

Any titans on the team yet? Anyone tried this oc trick?

[John P. Myers]

Any titans on the team yet? Anyone tried this oc trick?

These guys did, if no one here has yet: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/...cking_review/2