The Nvidia Titan X Pascal is without a doubt the “fastest” consumer graphics card currently available on the market. The branding causes confusion not only in the name but also in it visual similarity to not only the previous Titan X but to the founder’s edition GTX 1080. The price to performance is confusing as well for gamers. Even though Nvidia has placed it in the GeForce GTX line, which implies gaming, they have stated that it is aimed towards machine learning. But don’t worry I am looking at this card from the PC gaming perspective.
The Titan X Pascal features a black shroud over the reference designed cooler. At this point, while the cooler design is visually appealing, it’s performance has not improved over the previous generations and still hits serious thermal limitations.
The back of the card is graced with a black backplate identical to the Founder’s Edition line. While it gives the card a nice visual effect it is unfortunately cheap materials.
Nvidia advertises that the temperature limit is 94 degrees Celsius, but the card begins throttling at 84 degrees Celsius unless you manually adjust it in software like Afterburner. To keep temps down and clocks stable you will have to run the fans on a more aggressive fan profile that overpowers the sound coming from my rack mounted server. That’s not in a rack, just on the floor, it’s a good foot rest.
Display adapters include 3 display port 1.4 ports, a single hdmi 2.0b port, and a single DVI. Next we have a 6pin power adapter sporting a 7+2 Power Phase, drawing a maximum of 250 watts. While the low power requirements for this amount of power is impressive, at this price point the enthusiast that buys this card is less concerned with power consumption and personally I would prefer not having the limitations that are caused by a relatively weak power phase for a card in this price range. It is also very obviously the second largest limitation to stable boost clocks for the card.
Under the hood the card sports a 1531mhz boost clock, which we were able to overclock to +200MHz resulting in the card boosting to 2025MHz if you remove the power and thermal limitations with Afterburner. The boost clock communicates over a 384bit bus with 8gb of gddr5x at a 10000Mhz effective clock, which I found no fps gain when overclocking.
All games were benchmarked in 1080p at highest available settings, unless those settings are specific to either AMD or NVIDIA; for example, Pure Hair. I am specifically testing in 1080p because my own personal goal is to be able to play every game at 144 frames per second with max settings.
In Rise of the Tomb raider the Titan hit 106.7 frames per second. So unfortunately twelve hundred dollars later and we still aren’t meeting my goal in every game.
Forza Motorsport 6: Apex Beta almost hit the magic number pushing 138 frames per second, unfortunately this wasn’t very consistent with frequent drops closer to 100.
Time Spy Graphics test 1 scored 100.99, sorry not .69 frames per second and Time Spy graphics test two scored 82.66 frames per second.
Hitman, did not get the typical 30 percent boost over the GTX 1080 like the rest of the games and fell short of my magical number pulling in 133 frames per second.
Doom seems to have hit it’s limit with the Titan X hitting a consistent and locked 200 frames per second.
I was hitting a wall with Gears of War Ultimate Edition after attempting to perform the upgrade to Windows 10 Anniversary edition. For whatever reason it was capping the framerate at 60 fps. After a fresh install of windows and clean drivers from the “Anniversary” option on the Nvidia website the Titan X hit a massive 211 frames per second.
Total War: Warhammer was giving me the same issues as Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, therefore we know it’s a windows issue and not a game or hardware problem. Once this was cleared up it stayed above my magical number with a consistent 151.6 frames per second.
While the industrial design choices of the Titan XP are incredibly disappointing, the overall performance for gaming (even at 1080p) shows enough improvement to qualify as bleeding edge. Since we are finally at the point of incredibly high framerates in the latest triple A titles in 1080p it may justify a resolution upgrade for some. Personally, I would look at the 1440p range as 4k still seems to be hit or miss. It’s for this same reason I don’t recommend SLI. Let me be clear that this card is not for the masses, the price point makes it unattainable for most and highly impractical for the rest. Thanks for watching. This is blindrun with Son of a Tech, and I will see you next Tuesday.
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