Nvidia’s Titan V tested in-game using Futuremark’s 3DMark

Titan V benchmarks have been cropping up for the past week, giving us a deeper look into Nvidia’s new Volta architecture across a variety of tools. This time, the card is put through its paces against modern games using the ever-popular Futuremark 3DMark benchmarking software. Oh, hi Mark.

Under the hood of the $3,000 Titan V are 5,120 shader units with memory clock of 1,850 MHz. A lot of its cost comes from swapping the GDDR5 bus type to make use of the expensive HBM2 instead, usually found on professional cards such as Nvidia’s Tesla P100 and V100.

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It seems like a lot of this goes to waste when it comes to gaming, as the Titan V gives just a 15 – 20 percent increase across DX11, DX12 and Vulkan APIs. According to our friends over at HardwareLuxx, this can jump to a peak of 35 – 40 percent thanks to the increased shaders, but this often leaves silicon going underutilised.

A lot of the time, the Titan V seems to contend with the high-speed GTX 1080 Ti variety of cards, actually losing out to the Caseking KingMod GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FE under 3DMark’s Fire Strike Extreme preset, but managed to take the top spot back in Fire Strike Ultra. This averages at approximately 30 percent quicker than the Nvidia Founder’s Edition 1080 and scrapes just over 12 percent faster than the 1080 Ti.

Regarding in-game performance, the Titan V tends to show significant performance increases over other Nvidia GPUs when pushed to 4K resolution. This is particularly evident with Star Wars Battlefront II, where it peaks 24 frames per second higher than the GTX 1080 Ti, and in PUBG with a peak of 11 frames per second higher. One thing that is noticeable, however, is that the Titan V often has a greater ranger between its average frames per second and its peak.

If Volta follows in the footsteps of its predecessor, Pascal, in terms of consumer releases for cards, it could be a long while before we see Nvidia cater to the low, mid and high end sufficiently. Still, Nvidia’s Titan V kicks things off in order to appeal to professional users first and foremost, and we should see reduced and optimised cards trickle down to a more consumer friendly price point throughout 2018.

KitGuru Says: Its price to performance might not suit gaming as well as we might have hoped, but the same rings true for almost any professional grade card. They work for games, but they aren’t built or optimised for them. More tests are being conducted across the board and we should see more on it in the near future.

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