Here are early Titan V benchmarks

Last week, Nvidia surprised everyone with the unveiling of its new Titan V graphics card. It's important to note that the Titan V isn't billed as a gaming card—Nvidia even told us directly that "Titan V is not for gaming" when I inquired about getting a review sample. Obviously, $2,999 for just a graphics card is an obscene amount of money, and I get that the most important feature for the target audience is the compute performance, specifically using algorithms that can leverage the Tensor cores, but we still want to know how it fares in other workloads. Thankfully, Videocardz and other places (including Reddit) have started to post some preliminary numbers.

As you might expect, the benefits of Nvidia's new uber-GPU for gaming and graphics purposes aren't all that large, especially considering the price. The GTX 1080 Ti has a nominal performance rating of 11.8 TFLOPS (boost), and the Titan V is rated at 14.9 TFLOPS (boost), both for single-precision FP32 workloads, but how that translates to actual games often depends on many other factors—CPU speed, RAM, resolution and quality settings, and the game/application being used. On paper, we would expect the Titan V to outpace the 1080 Ti by up to 25-30 percent. In practice, it's sometimes a lot more than that… and sometimes a lot less. Here are the current results, using the posted Titan V numbers along with some of our own internal testing:

The difficulty in analyzing the current results is that we don't have fully identical systems. The Titan V benchmarks were done with a Core i7-6700K, apparently running stock, and that immediately raises some concerns about CPU bottlenecks. Videocardz for its part used a Core i7-6800K, a different architecture running on a different platform, with different CPU clocks and core counts. Both the Titan V and Videocardz GPUs are also listed as overclocked, though specific details aren't given. For my tests, I used an i7-8700K, running stock, with an MSI GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X (factory overclocked), giving a third data point.

The benchmarks we can easily compare include 3DMark and Unigine tests, aren't always the best predictor of gaming performance. I tried running Rise of the Tomb Raider and Ashes of the Singularity benchmarks as well, but my results indicate either a significant difference in settings or some other factor, so I've omitted the game performance for now.

While Videocardz shows only modest improvements in performance, my GTX 1080 Ti numbers are quite a bit lower. Firestrike Ultra is only 8 percent faster, but Firestrike Extreme shows a 26 percent improvement, Time Spy a 33 percent increase, Heaven gives a 32 percent improvement, and Superposition gives 23 percent at 8K optimized and a whopping 63 percent increase at 1080p extreme.

Obviously there's still the issue of real value, as even a 60 percent improvement is nothing compared with a price that's four times as high. And while Nvidia says the Titan V isn't for gaming, we're still trying to get a card for testing, just to provide some concrete numbers. I also hope to run a few deep learning tests, to show what the Titan V can do with the right workload. But if you're interested in playing games, I can only recommend holding off to see what the actual consumer models of Volta look like.

TOPICS
Jarred Walton

Jarred's love of computers dates back to the dark ages when his dad brought home a DOS 2.3 PC and he left his C-64 behind. He eventually built his first custom PC in 1990 with a 286 12MHz, only to discover it was already woefully outdated when Wing Commander was released a few months later. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Brigham Young University and has been working as a tech journalist since 2004, writing for AnandTech, Maximum PC, and PC Gamer. From the first S3 Virge '3D decelerators' to today's GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance. 

Latest in Graphics Cards
XFX Radeon RX 9070 XT Quicksilver graphics card on a blue background with angel wings on either side
XFX is letting you add customisable 3D printed wings to its Quicksilver RX 9070-series graphics cards
Gigabyte G6X gaming laptop
More affordable sub-$1,000 RTX 50-series laptops likely coming in May as RTX 5060 and RTX 5050 models spotted online
Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 9070 XT on a red and orange background
Some Sapphire RX 9070/9070 XT graphics cards have hard-to-spot foam inside that must be removed or it 'may result in a decrease in cooling capacity or product failure'
The PCIe slot on an Asus ROG Strix B850-F Gaming WiFi motherboard, showing the Q-release latch for GPUs.
Gigabyte seemingly mocks Asus' recent Q-release debacle with a video swapping out an RTX 5070 Ti 100 times
Cyberpunk upscaling
New modder tool makes it easier than ever to swap AMD's FSR 4 scaling for Nvidia's DLSS or Intel's XeSS and vice versa
Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti graphics card
Specs for Nvidia's new RTX 5050, 5060, and 5060 Ti GPUs leak out and that 5060 might actually be half decent. If it's priced right
Latest in News
spectre divide
Spectre Divide and its studio are shutting down after just six months: 'The industry is in a tough spot right now'
Naoe looking at the wrist blade in Assassin's Creed Shadows
Ubisoft backflips, says Assassin's Creed Shadows will support Steam Deck at launch, but I doubt I'll actually want to play it there
Henry from KCD2 wearing nice outfits
'Diversify your fashion endgame' with this Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 mod that gives Henry fly new gambesons, pourpoints, and caftans
Masked Counter-Terrorist in helmet in forefront with sunglasses and beret-wearing CT in background touching headset
There's hope yet for Classic Offensive after its Steam rejection: The team behind the Counter-Strike 1.6 revival mod is in touch with Valve about its 'concerns'
Recently appointed Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan.
Here comes Intel's new CEO: a semiconductor veteran that won the same prestigious award as Jensen Huang and Lisa Su
BURBANK, CALIFORNIA - AUGUST 15: Protestors attend the SAG-AFTRA Video Game Strike Picket on August 15, 2024 in Burbank, California. (Photo by Lila Seeley/Getty Images)
8 months into their strike, videogame voice actors say the industry's latest proposal is 'filled with alarming loopholes that will leave our members vulnerable to AI abuse'