The Ludicrous Graphics Test: Dual GTX Titan SLI for 4K and Triple Monitor Gaming

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For some time now the most po[CENSORED]r screen resolution among gamers has been 1080p, though the community is slowly but surely migrating to 1440p thanks to the increased availability of quality 1440p displays and affordable GPUs such as the Radeon RX 480 and GeForce GTX 1060 which are quite capable at this resolution.

But what about 4K gaming? Ultra HD displays have been around for a few years now and today it's possible to pick up a 28" 4K monitor for under $400. The reason so few gamers are going this route is because of the GPU power required to drive such a display.

Only recently with the arrival of the GTX 1080 has a single GPU been powerful enough to game at 4K and even then at times some tweaking is necessary for optimal gameplay. As impressive as the GTX 1080 is, Nvidia's latest Titan X boasts 40% more CUDA cores, making it all the more of an ally to 4K gamers.

The issue here, other than the card's confusing name, is the fact that it costs twice that of the GTX 1080. The MSRP is a staggering $1,200, for which you receive a 16nm Pascal GPU consisting of 12 billion transistors in a 471mm2 die.

This allows for a total of 3584 CUDA cores, all of which operate at a base clock speed of 1.4GHz, though GPU Boost 3.0 will often run much higher than that. Like the GTX 1080, the Titan X still uses GDDR5X memory but its bandwidth has been increased by 50% to 480GB/s courtesy of the 384-bit wide memory bus.

The Titan X should have no trouble providing highly playable performance at 4K in all of the latest triple-A titles. This got us thinking: how many 4K displays could a pair of Titan X SLI graphics cards drive?

In the past we've tested the most powerful dual GPU options available to see how they handled three extreme resolution displays. Back in 2011 for instance, we compared the GTX 590 and HD 6990 at 7680x1600 (triple 1600p). In other occasion we did all SLI and CrossFire pairings however that was when frame pacing became a big issue.

Today's testing will demonstrate the capabilities of dual-flagship setups including the Titan X and R9 Fury X at resolutions as high as 11520x2160 or three 4K displays. That's a shipload of pixels, but perhaps it won't be too heavy for $2,400 worth of graphics gear to haul.

Without further ado, let the benchmarks... begin!

Test System Specs

• Intel Core i7-6700K @ 4.50 GHz (Skylake)
• Asrock Z170 Z170 Extreme7+
• 32GB (4x8GB) DDR4-3000
• Samsung SSD 850 Pro 2TB
• Silverstone Strider Series ST1000-G Evolution
• AMD Crimson Edition 16.9.2 Hotfix
• GeForce Game Ready Driver 372.90 - WHQL
• Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

Benchmarks: Tom Clancy's The Division, Star Wars Battlefront

Using a single 1440p display, two Titan X graphics cards average 143fps with the minimum frame rate staying just above 120fps. This means the Titan X cards aren't even offering 40% scaling at 1440p, which is quite disappointing. That said, The Division has never offered great multi-GPU support. The weak SLI scaling also allowed a single Titan X to roughly match a pair of 1080s.

Scaling improves slightly at 4K as adding a second Titan X improved performance by 45%. Again this is weak but we have come to expect that in The Division.

Running three 1440p displays still sees the dual Titan X cards deliver an average of 60fps with a minimum of 50fps. This is pretty impressive triple-1440p performance though it has to be said that SLI scaling over a single card was the weakest we have seen yet in this title.

Unfortunately, no matter how much you spend on GPUs it looks like triple-4K gaming in The Division is just fantasy for now. SLI scaling improved performance by 40% but that meant going from an average of 20fps to just 28fps, so not exactly playable performance.

SLI scaling improves in Star Wars Battlefront. Here the Titan X duo provides an impressive 200fps on average or 56% faster than a single card. Clearly there was even more performance to be had as the minimum frame rate only dropped to 199fps. That being the case, I expect SLI scaling to improve at 4K.

Finally, we see some truly impressive results. This time the Titan X SLI configuration provided 100% more performance than a single card. This allowed an average of 135fps at 4K which it has to be said it quite incredible.

Even with triple 1440p monitors the Titan X duo is able to push 100fps making them almost 80% faster than a single Titan X.

Driving three 4K displays while maintaining an average of 50fps is pretty special. The Titan X combo never dipped below 44fps and as such had no trouble delivering playable performance. SLI scaled by 92% here taking the frame rate from 26fps to 50fps.

Taking 4K Performance to the Next Level

The new Titan X may be ludicrously expensive but it's also ludicrously fast. Nvidia blew our socks off with the GTX 1080 only four months ago and now the company did what was seemingly impossible by making that same GPU look slow to some extent.

Folks playing at 4K will love what the Titan X has to offer and 60fps 4K gaming is now a reality. Although SLI didn't always impress us with strong scaling, it did take things to the next level.

In Mirror's Edge Catalyst for example, a single Titan X fell just short of 60fps and adding a second card saw the minimum frame rate stay well above 60fps, while stunning titles such as Rise of the Tomb Raider and Star Wars Battlefront pushed well past the 100fps barrier.

Unfortunately, no matter how much money you have, triple-4K gaming isn't yet possible, at least not without compromise. We honestly didn't expect to find playable frame rates at 11520x2160 as this was more experiment than anything else, but it was still interesting to see how a pair of Titan X cards handle this extreme resolution.

The more po[CENSORED]r triple-1440p resolution provided more desirable results and it was here that we found smooth playable performance in all titles tested. The GTX 1080 SLI cards were also impressive, delivering around 60fps in games such as Star Wars Battlefront, Far Cry Primal, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Grand Theft Auto V.

Given how powerful the Pascal Titan X is, this got us wondering: if Nvidia can repeat what it did this generation the next time around by offering Titan-like performance for $400, this will be incredibly good news for gamers. For now, most can only dream of owning one Titan X, let alone two of them, but it's nice to see where we are and where mainstream gaming should be in the relatively near future.

A feature we're keen to test but currently can't is Nvidia's Simultaneous Multi-Projection engine. This upcoming feature is hardware dependent and specific to the Pascal architecture for now; in a nutshell what Simultaneous Multi-Projection does is reproject geometry based on more than one viewport, fixing the fisheye effect with multi-monitor setups (or VR) by giving a more natural projection of graphics and adding efficiency gains.
This will require game developers to implement support and no released titles have done so yet, at least not to our knowledge. We've heard that the Unreal Engine and Unity are set to implement this, so hopefully we can check it out in the near future.

Overall, impressive stuff here. It's a shame SLI doesn't scale perfectly on all titles, but limited multi-GPU support has been something all SLI and Crossfire owners have had to deal with since the arrival of these technologies. DirectX 12 should help improve support, but we continue to wait for games built for DX12 instead of it being an afterthought.

 

Review By: TechSpot