Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X SLI Benchmarks

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Performance that will make you see double

So you might have heard that Nvidia released the GeForce GTX Titan X video card yesterday. It's the fastest single-GPU card on the planet (though not the fastest single card, because of the dual GPUs in the Titan Z and the Radeon R9 295X2). Maybe most people would be satisfied with the benchmarks of a single Titan X, but we're not most people. So we called a guy who knows a guy, and we acquired a second Titan X. The things we do for you people!
To recap, this is the system that we've been using to test our video cards:

Part	Component
CPU	Intel Core i7-3960X (at stock clock speeds; 3.3GHz base, 3.9GHz turbo)
CPU Cooler	Corsair Hydro Series H100
Mobo	Asus Rampage IV Extreme
RAM	4x 4GB G.Skill Ripjaws X, 2133MHz CL9
Power Supply	Corsair AX1200
SSD	1TB Crucial M550
OS	Windows 8.1 64-bit
Case	NZXT Phantom 530

It's an aging system, but it has plenty of juice to drive up to four GPUs. We used six titles to benchmark the Titan X and similar cards: Metro: Last Light, Hitman: Absolution, Tomb Raider, Batman: Arkham Origins, Unigine Heaven, and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. We use these games because they have an even balance of Nvidia friendliness and AMD friendliness, they'll push your hardware when you max-out the settings, and they have built-in benchmarks, so you can reproduce our results yourself.

The Nvidia cards were benchmarked with the GeForce 347.84 sent to Titan X reviewers, which are apparently nearly identical to the 347.88 drivers released to the public yesterday. Our MSI Radeon R9 290X Lightning Edition card used AMD's Omega drivers released in December. The other cards in the mix are the Asus GTX970-DCMOC-4GD5; and the Asus STRIX-GTX780-OC-6GD5. The GTX 780 Ti in this roundup is the reference model. All clock speeds in the chart below are of the actual cards we tested, rather than the default clock speeds of the baseline models, except when a baseline model was actually used.
Since we were not blessed with a second MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G, the SLI benchmark is of two reference 980s in our possession. The difference will be small, but it is there.

	Titan X	Titan	GTX 980	GTX 970	GTX 780 Ti	GTX 780	R9 290X
Generation	GM200	GK110	GM204	GM204	GK110	GK104	Hawaii
Core Clock (MHz)	1,000	837	1,216	1,088	876	889	"up to" 1GHz
Boost Clock (MHz)	1,075	876	1,317	1,228	928	941	N/A
VRAM Clock (MHz)	7,010	6,000	7,000	7,000	7,000	6,000	5,000
VRAM Amount	12GB	6GB	4GB	4GB	3GB	6GB	4GB
Bus	384-bit	384-bit	256-bit	256-bit	384-bit	384-bit	512-bit
ROPs	96	48	64	56	48	48	64
TMUs	192	224	128	104	240	192	176
Shaders	3,072	2,688	2,048	1,664	2,880	2,304	2,816
SMs	24	15	16	13	15	12	N/A
TDP (watts)	250	250	165	145	250	250	290
Launch Date	March 2015	March 2013	Sept 2014	Sept 2014	Nov 2013	May 2013	Oct 2013
Launch Price	$999	$999	$549	$329	$649	$699	$549

You can refer to our Titan X review for more information on what these specs mean. We don't want to flap our gums here any more than necessary. Now that we've explained the context of the benchmarks, here they are:
3840x2160 Bechmark Results, Average Frames Per Second

	Metro: Last Light	Arkham Origins	Hitman: Absolution	Shadow of Mordor	Tomb Raider*	Unigine Heaven
Titan X SLI	54	94	58	75	83/112	49
Titan X	35	53	33	44	44/60	26
SLI Scaling	54%	77%	76%	70%	87%/87%	88%
Titan	24	34	22	25	26/37	18
980	32	41	24	37	36/48	20
980 SLI	46	74	44	59	64/84	35
SLI Scaling	44%	80%	83%	60%	77%/75%	75%
970	24	32	19	28	27/37	15
780 Ti	27	38	23	32	29/40	19
780	26	35	23	30	27/38	18
290X	28	41	29	37	31/43	17

*TressFX on/TressFX offWe're benchmarking these games on their highest presets with 4x multi-sample anti-aliasing (or in Tomb Raider's case, 2x super-sample anti-aliasing, since it has no MSAA option), so you're not going to see ideal performance here. We push these cards by design, rather than aiming for playable framerates. At the prices you're paying for these cards, you shouldn't have to make many compromises. Even with a second Titan X in the mix, though, we still can't hit 60fps across the board. Granted, at 4K, you probably don't need 4xMSAA, but it is interesting to see just how much this resolution affects performance. What's also interesting is how much the SLI scaling varies from game to game. The Titan X is a lot more constistent, but both it and the GTX 980 struggle with Metro: Last Light (which, it should be said, is an AMD-friendly game, as is Hitman: Absolution).In the coming days, we plan to get you some more multi-GPU benches to compare against the Titan X. In the meantime, we hope you found these new numbers both delicious and nutritious.

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