So, Skynet's amygdala is here in the form of Nvidia's new appropriately titled Titan. It's big and beefy in the sense that a cow is large and constitutes tender moist burger meat, only a cow doesn't run Crysis quite as fast.
Perhaps, as has been suggested by some pundits, the Titan may in fact be too fast. The main stickler apparently being that 7.1 billion transistors and 2688 stream processors is more than any mere mortal needs.
Well, I say the following not because this is PCETTA, but because to me this is common sense: what a load of bull (just to continue the theme).
Yes, the Titan is Nvidia's fastest GPU to date and yes reading its specs is a form of geek porn. But the way I see it, it's barely adequate.
Are you mad Ashton? Why yes I am, but that's beside the point -- we play today with high resolutions, where 1080p is standard and 2560x1440 is taking off; we play with 3D and 120 Hz displays, where 120fps needs to be pushed in 1080p and up; we play with Surround and Eyefinity, driving three monitors as high as 7680x1080 (or more for 16:10 users); and this is to say nothing of AA -- there's a reason FXAA and SMAA have become so important in recent times: no card can run high resolution and high-level MSAA consistently in all games, it's just too computationally expensive By way of example Crysis 2 - a good benchmark of current-gen tech if there is one - uses a mixture of depth of field, post processing and its own temporal-AA to more hide jaggies rather than smooth them out because no card handle it all. Not even the Titan.
This is to say nothing of its 6GB of VRAM which, on one site I read, described this as 'excessive'. Really? That's at best short-sighted, and at worst just wrong. Again with Crysis 2, it breaks the 2GB VRAM barrier of your standard GTX 680 -- the current flagship -- with the official high-res pack installed. A high-res pack, it's worth noting, that represents what_you should be seeing if Titan-class cards were standard two years ago. High-res packs for a game aren't a bonus addon: the textures are often already there in development, then downscaled because hardware can't keep up. You only have to look at games like Skyrim with all the bells on and texture mods hitting close to 4GB here and now, so what do we think the next few years will bring? Of course, multi-GPU users will say if one Titan is not enough you can always SLI or Crossfire, but considering you'll need to mortgage your Nan just to buy one this isn't exactly practical for most people. Which also only serves to highlight how less this, or any card for that matter, becomes if you need two or more to get what fairly I would consider to be a typical gaming goal: to play the latest game with all the bells and whistles, at decent resolution (1080p, but preferably higher), high framerate (120 if you're lucky), and with good AA. Some game engines do allow you to do this, usually older ones. They're less complex and thus faster, if not as pretty. But for tomorrow's games, games that come out this year, the Titan will be just adequate, depending on what you want to play and how you play.
I must be hard to please, I know, but I'd like the hardware to catch up to the software and displays we're using today. I'm looking higher, to whatever's coming next.
http://www.nvidia.com/titan-graphics-card
