3xTitan vs 3x780Ti @ 4k?

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CrazyRob

[H]ard|Gawd
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I'm trying to find some benchmarks online for a friend of mine that has to have the latest and greatest. After reading many reviews online, including the one here at the [H], it's obvious that in single card configurations, the 780TI is consistently out performing the Titan, as it should with it's additional SP and faster memory clock.
[H said:
ardOCP]In all of our testing today, we tried to look for the differences between 3GB and 4GB of VRAM while gaming. We encountered no scenarios in these games where the 3GB of VRAM on the GTX 780 Ti was holding it back at Ultra HD 4K gaming. We also encountered no scenarios where the 4GB was an advantage on the R9 290X.

The reason why we aren't seeing the difference between VRAM capacity right now is because these cards aren't fast enough to exploit the kind of game settings that would push the limits of VRAM. At this resolution these just aren't fast enough to exploit the highest in-game settings, and high levels of AA.

We think the difference in VRAM capacity isn't going to show itself until you are running SLI and CrossFire plus you need to be running the right game that loads up the VRAM. Right now, that is few and far between in the games that demand such a large VRAM capacity. BF4 is one game that may show a difference, and we have lots planned for BF4 testing in the future.
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Has anyone seen any 2 way or 3 way sli configurations where the Titan pulls ahead? So far the only thing I've found is this: http://www.digitalstormonline.com/unlocked/4k-resolution-gaming-on-the-nvidia-gtx-780ti-gtx-titan-and-gtx-780-idnum102/. Looking at the benchmark for Crysis 3, they show 2 way sli 780Ti's neck and neck with the Titans, with a slight but negligable advantage to the Titans. I wish they had benchmarked a 3 way Titan config as well. Anyone found anything similar?
 
Titan Tri-SLI costs $3000, 780Ti Tri-SLI costs $2100. Half an FPS in one particular game for $900 and slower performance in all the others. There's no point. Forget Titan for gaming, period.
 
evilsofa I think it may depend on the game. I'm willing to bet the 3 vs 6GB of RAM is a factor in at least a few games when maxed out at 4k. That and when the guy is even considering tri-SLI and a 4k monitor I'm willing to bet cost isn't a huge concern.

On that note I do not know of any benchmarks comparing those configurations. It would be interesting to see though.
 
Yeah, cost isn't a concern for this case, especially since he already owns 3 titans. My question is at what resolution and quality settings in what game engines would we hit the vram limit of 3GB, assuming gpu horsepower wasn't a limiting factor. I'd love to see some more taxing games, like Metro:LL and BF4 multiplayer.
 
evilsofa said:
Titan Tri-SLI costs $3000, 780Ti Tri-SLI costs $2100. Half an FPS in one particular game for $900 and slower performance in all the others. There's no point. Forget Titan for gaming, period.
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Unless u plan on playing games with high graphical intensity or games that came out this year or newer. Considering BF4 on tri 1080p is using upwards of 5gigs of vram. Titan isn't the best choice if u run 1 1080p monitor, but 3 monitors or higher than 1440p on games that are launching from this point forward it's likely still gonna be the only card that can handle all the eye candy.
 
CrazyRob said:
I'm trying to find some benchmarks online for a friend of mine that has to have the latest and greatest. After reading many reviews online, including the one here at the [H], it's obvious that in single card configurations, the 780TI is consistently out performing the Titan, as it should with it's additional SP and faster memory clock.


Has anyone seen any 2 way or 3 way sli configurations where the Titan pulls ahead? So far the only thing I've found is this: http://www.digitalstormonline.com/unlocked/4k-resolution-gaming-on-the-nvidia-gtx-780ti-gtx-titan-and-gtx-780-idnum102/. Looking at the benchmark for Crysis 3, they show 2 way sli 780Ti's neck and neck with the Titans, with a slight but negligable advantage to the Titans. I wish they had benchmarked a 3 way Titan config as well. Anyone found anything similar?
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If your using one card and/or one monitor - best bet is the. 780 or the 290x. Can't really argue that. If your running a 30" or multi monitors, the titan is going to annihilate games that use more than 3gb of vram obv
 
klepp0906 said:
Unless u plan on playing games with high graphical intensity or games that came out this year or newer. Considering BF4 on tri 1080p is using upwards of 5gigs of vram. Titan isn't the best choice if u run 1 1080p monitor, but 3 monitors or higher than 1440p on games that are launching from this point forward it's likely still gonna be the only card that can handle all the eye candy.
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Being that the 780 ti with 3GB can run BF4 with all the eye candy at 4k resolution which is higher than 3x1080p, there is no problem.

Games will optimally use the RAM that is availabe on the card. That is why you are seeing the ~5GB usage. It doesn't 'require' it. Crysis 3 on the other hand...
 
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Agreed. 760SLI is faster in every game than a titan and half the price. Even the 780's are wayy overpriced for the performance level you get vs the 760SLI. Only reason to get a 780 over them period is if you plan on getting another one at some point for SLI.
 
At 4k resolution I would say stick with the Titans. That extra 3GB in vram will definitely come in handy at that high of a resolution. The only upgrade I would look at is if 6GB 780 Ti's come out before maxwell.
 
This guy isn't interested in 760 SLI, 1080p, or getting the most bang for the buck. Are half of you even reading the first post? He's trying to get the most performance possible for 4k gaming and looking for performance numbers at 4k with tri-SLI Titans and 780ti's. Do they exist? I can't find any. Vega's set up may be the closest you can get for that, perhaps you could PM him.

I'm willing to bet this is a situation where the extra VRAM on the Titan is going to help with several current games, not to mention games a year from now when he's likely to be on the same system. When you don't have enough VRAM no matter how much GPU power you have, your experience is going to suck. Unless somebody can show him otherwise I don't think it's good advice to rule out the Titan. The 290X should also be a consideration as well, but I worry about the crazy amount of heat they would produce in a trifire setup, so water cooling might be necessary in that situation.
 
Unless AIB's make a 780 Ti with 6GB of vRAM, the Titans are the only viable option. However none of the choices are optimal.
 
Since he already has three Titan's, suggest to him that he start out with those and see how it goes. If he's not satisfied with the performance, then I doubt the miniscule upgrade to tri-SLI 780ti's is going to change that.
 
Yeah if he's flashed them and is holding ~1050 MHz on those Titans, it's probably not worth the drop to half the vram. Unless he can assemble three silicon lottery winner 1300MHz 780Ti cards.
 
kcthebrewer said:
Being that the 780 ti with 3GB can run BF4 with all the eye candy at 4k resolution which is higher than 3x1080p, there is no problem.

Games will optimally use the RAM that is availabe on the card. That is why you are seeing the ~5GB usage. It doesn't 'require' it. Crysis 3 on the other hand...
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Sigh, I'll get the source. Gimme a bit. I detest having to do this. Unlike some I don't pull numbers from my imagination.
 
klepp0906 said:
http://www.guru3d.com/news_story/battlefield_4_running_at_4k_(4096x2160).html

There you go. BF4, 4K reso, maxed. 5.1 vram. /bow
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Now, here's the question... Does it actually need that much video RAM, or does it just cache more data "because it's there" without actually benefiting performance?

As a developer, it makes perfect sense to cache as much data as possible if extra resources are available, but that doesn't mean performance will actually be impacted at all by caching less data and swapping it (preemptively) more often.
 
Unknown-One said:
Now, here's the question... Does it actually need that much video RAM, or does it just cache more data "because it's there" without actually benefiting performance?

As a developer, it makes perfect sense to cache as much data as possible if extra resources are available, but that doesn't mean performance will actually be impacted at all by caching less data and swapping it (preemptively) more often.
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Yeap. I could be wrong in this thinking but: Isn't this the reason we have such high memory bandwidth on the current cards? All the game needs to do is render what the player is looking at currently right? And then as the player moves the game loads new textures as needed. My 780 Ti overclocked has a memory bandwidth of 360GB/s. To me that means the card can swap out textures/models at a speed of 360GB/s. Perhaps I am wrong in this line of thinking??
 
BF3, 4k, High Settings, 2xAA, sits about 2.8GB of ram usage. No upscaling, this is on a 4k monitor. SLI GTX 780s.

I hope maxing the game sans SSAA does not use up 5GB of vram. Seems like a big jump.
 
Sufu said:
BF3, 4k, High Settings, 2xAA, sits about 2.8GB of ram usage. No upscaling, this is on a 4k monitor. SLI GTX 780s.

I hope maxing the game sans SSAA does not use up 5GB of vram. Seems like a big jump.
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you figure each x step does exactly what it says.. multiplies it. getting into large amounts of data and its exponential obviously
 
Everyone is ASSUMING that the 3GB effective memory will never be a limitation for the 780ti. BUT, as soon as it becomes an issue, the whole rig grinds to a halt, whereas the Titan's extra memory headroom could keep the rig viable for a few more years even.

It seems to me that 3GB is sort of lean on video memory. Nobody knows for sure if that is enough. I know for example, my GTX590 which has 1.5 gigs of memory effective is powerful enough to blow the doors off of BF4, but I am hitting a memory brickwall I never thought I would hit, even at 1080p.

That doesn't make the Titan the better solution, but to discount the amount of video memory on the GTX780ti is a mistake.
 
pandora's box said:
Yeap. I could be wrong in this thinking but: Isn't this the reason we have such high memory bandwidth on the current cards? All the game needs to do is render what the player is looking at currently right? And then as the player moves the game loads new textures as needed. My 780 Ti overclocked has a memory bandwidth of 360GB/s. To me that means the card can swap out textures/models at a speed of 360GB/s. Perhaps I am wrong in this line of thinking??
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If by swap out you mean load in new textures that aren't on the card, no it won't be near that fast. I believe this memory bandwidth is only internal to the card and components within (don't have the time to look up a diagram). If you don't have as much vRAM as the game needs and you are loading textures from main RAM (best case, worst case actual I/O) to vRAM like others said, your game will grind to a halt. I remember this being the case on Skyrim on my GTX 580 with 1.5GB vRAM. Night and day difference upgrading to a GTX 670 with 4GB vRAM. No more vRAM wall @ 2560x1600 with mods and 4x TRSSAA.

I believe the memory bandwidth comes into play when the GPU core (or parts within) need to do "work" with the vRAM. If I'm loading a scene at 7680x1600 and while I do have more textures I need to put in, I'm also changing what is being called up from that vRAM at a faster rate. I believe in those cases is where you see the vRAM bandwidth come into play.

I could be mis stating some things here or over generalizing so feel free to correct and/or fill in the gaps where needed.
 
pandora's box said:
Yeap. I could be wrong in this thinking but: Isn't this the reason we have such high memory bandwidth on the current cards? All the game needs to do is render what the player is looking at currently right? And then as the player moves the game loads new textures as needed. My 780 Ti overclocked has a memory bandwidth of 360GB/s. To me that means the card can swap out textures/models at a speed of 360GB/s. Perhaps I am wrong in this line of thinking??
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I'm afraid it doesn't work like that. The theoretical maximum transfer rate for data from the main system is limited by the PCI Express bus itself (16 GB/s for PCI-E 3.0 @ x16), and realistically is lower still due to other constraints clayton mentioned. Back in the old days ATi cards couldn't even take a FRAPS screenshot without a noticeable pause because they were so slow at sending data back over the AGP bus.
 
rincewind said:
I'm afraid it doesn't work like that. The theoretical maximum transfer rate for data from the main system is limited by the PCI Express bus itself (16 GB/s for PCI-E 3.0 @ x16), and realistically is lower still due to other constraints clayton mentioned. Back in the old days ATi cards couldn't even take a FRAPS screenshot without a noticeable pause because they were so slow at sending data back over the AGP bus.
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+1 - VRAM buffer is a VRAM buffer, any 'new' information sent is limited by PCI-e bus speeds, which although impressive sounding, pale when compared to local bus speeds on a vidcard...the perfect system(PC), where everything - processor/s, system buses, ram, interconnects and storage, 'shared' the same bus speeds, would be....amazing...and ridiculously fast..sry, I know, am dreaming..
 
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