Five Card Trick? Bank Collects Again!
Before the fervent debate could even begin to resolve, out of the green gloom strode Nvidia’s next commander in chief. The GTX 780 “ti”, to the casual onlooker, no more than an exact copy of his predecessor, but closer inspection revealed not only markedly higher core and RAM frequencies but a full complement of 15 streaming multiprocessors. In essence, a “Kepler” with ALL the stops pulled out. Double precision units were still lacking but the combination of 16 extra texture units and greater memory bandwidth than even the Titan could provide was sufficient for the card to achieve a narrow points victory over the R9 290x, though when Ultra HD was called for or Crossfired 290s battled SLI’d 780s , many still tossed AMD’s card the bouquet.
The last few chapters in this saga shall be kept brief and simple. Since as the sun began to set over the 28nm era, one could scarcely express the tactics of old Red Beard and Green eyes in any other way. Both had dispatched their top talent to dash the others dreams into cascades of broken pixels, yet the war remained close enough for the most impartial of eye-candy junkies to refrain from proclaiming an outright victor
AMD with a monstrous machination that arguably delivered the ultimate 4K experience, especially in crossfire, but ran hotter and guzzled more from the wall. Nvidia three possible alternatives, one, the Titan overpriced by virtue of unnecessary features for the hard core gamer, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, mostly quieter. Two, the GTX 780, mostly slower but a little cheaper and lastly , the 780 ti, mostly faster, but a little pricier. To this formidable pontoon, Nvidia added a fourth and solution. February 2014 welcomed the GTX Titan Black, a “Kepler” toting general with absolutely no compromise.
All 15 streaming processors bellowing in unison with their double precision cores re-activated, memory back up to 6gb with both its speed and that of the GPU set to equal or greater than for all three predecessors. Though it was difficult to dispute that this definitive interpretation of Nvidia’s masterpiece scythed through more frames than all before it, it’s launch price was the same as the original Titan’s, negating consideration from all but money no object gamers or those that wished to harness the card’s compute power. the reason behind it’s release could be little else than a proud green giant forcefully asserting “because I can”.
The only thing left for him to do, was to turn his attention once more to doubles glory, but Red Beared, having patiently and many would claim, wisely observed while his nemesis played to the gallery, was about to blow his top. If the r9 290x had been a gamble on the customer’s tolerance for heat and noise in the face of a burning desire for benchmark omnipotence, it’s dual GPU counterpart took such a strategy to logical extremes. What does one get when they add Hawaii to Hawaii? A fine spring morning in April revealed the devastating answer….”Vesuvius”.
The R9 295X went further than any card had hitherto in a bid to bestow us with two bona fide flagship GPUs sitting line astern on the same PCB, with not the merest hint of a megahurt or megabyte sacrificed. Instead, this voracious videosaurus, a pair of legitimate 290Xs, was the first ever to require stock water cooling and its TDP of 500W prompted AMD to suggest a power supply of at least 1000 watts for any yearning to tame it. What’s that…..GFlops again? Yes, I know I mentioning less and less numbers, look, not much has changed you see? Nvidia keeps releasing the same card but with different bits working at different speeds and AMD has just multiplied everything by 2. If I mentioned the all the stats every time…oh please just look at those damned tables, they took me ages!
On the review front, testing methods were evolving almost as rapidly as the technology under scrutiny, with many sites now employing sophisticated forms of frame analysis whereby the duration of every frame could be accurately monitored and recorded, leaving no chance of misleading results or for the slightest of skips and stutters to escape criticism. The 295x proved more than equal to the challenge, establishing a new reference level in both raw pace and smoothness for cards housing dual GPUs and like the 290X, excelling at Ultra HD. A price just north of £1000 might have verged on gross parody to some, it remained proportionate to any alternative which could guarantee such stellar performance…i.e a pair of 780ti’s!
Oh…enough already…
All of which brings us neatly to the last but far from decisive instalment in this wearisome graphical chronology. Having at last exhausted the potential of his captain in singles combat and secured what was perhaps a technical, if hollow victory, old Green Eyes promptly attempted to emulate his sworn enemy in doubling the stakes. What emerged was the Titan-Z, supposedly twin Titan Blacks unified on a breath snatching, triple slotted formation. Well, the truth was somewhat different. The Titan Z might indeed have had all 15 of its streaming processors unlocked on both GPUs and with their full chorus of double precision units, but the maximum core speed of each had, by default, been governed down to over 100 mhz below that of the Titan Black.
Evidently, Nvidia were confident enough that 12GB of memory (a quarter more than the 295x) combined with a chip that had ultimately proven a tad fleeter than its rival’s in unaccompanied operation, afforded them the luxury of a little discretion, not to mention 125 watts less current. Unfortunately, such prudence was nullified by a price tag of £2300, well over double that of the R9 295X. Would this really translate into frame rates twice as high or as smooth? Could such wallet withering requests be justified. Why not let those experts with no need for cash do the talking and be proud in the face of so many choices in our ability to choose not to choose?