NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN SLI Review

👤by Richard Weatherstone Comments 📅14-04-13
Architecture



The architecture of the NVIDIA GTX TITAN core, the GK110 is an evolution of the GTX680's GK104. Both cores are based on Kepler architecture and both are built upon the 28nm ASIC. However the GK110 features 7.1 billion transistors compared to the 3.54 billion found in the GTX680 and the 4.4 billion in the AMD HD7970. The CUDA core count has also been increased to 2688 from 1536 of the GTX680 equating to a 4500 Gigaflop/s count.



The GK110 has an additional GPC to the four found on the GK104 and also and additional SMX in each GPC making 15 compared to the GTX 680's 8. There are 6 64-bit memory controllers (384bit) controlling the huge 6GB of GDDR5 which is yet another massive hike over the 256bit controller found on the GK104.



Above we can see a breakdown of an individual SMX.

NVIDIA's CUDA core count on the GTX TITAN weighs in at an astonishing 2688 but with each of the 15 SMX's carrying 192 (the same found on the GK104) that would equate to 2880. Take away 192 cores (a single SMX) and you are left with 2688 - the official CUDA core count so we can only surmise that one of the SMX cores is disabled which would no doubt help the manufacturing process by giving NVIDIA a greater yield count by allowing one 'dud' SMX per core.

We were very surprised that NVIDIA decided upon 6GB of GDDR5 as currently, even at our maximum benchmarking resolution of 2560x1600, 4GB is rarely tapped into so to grant the TITAN with 6GB seemed largely to be a bit of a waste. However, you have to consider two things here. One: It wasn't so long ago that we were stating 2GB was more than enough - 2GB is now beginning to show it's age. Two: Owners of GTX TITAN are unlikely to have a single 1920x1080 monitor and because of the Ultra high end enthusiast level it would be more likely to see owners of such a product having a single large monitor or indeed a multiple monitor setup. So, 6GB could be seen as an investment, especially as NVIDIA are keen to promote their delicious 3D vision surround to such people.

25 pages 1 2 3 4 > »

Comments