NVIDIA GTX Titan vs Sapphire AMD Toxic HD 7970 GHz Edition – Peformance Gaming Benchmarks

Updated: March 18, 2013

Now that the GTX Titan has been out for a few weeks, the drivers have matured for it, as have the drivers for AMD’s HD 7970, making them both more stable and performance driven to meet the demands of all the latest gaming titles that have been released lately. One game in particular was not even optimized until recently and so had to be omitted from our tests and that is the latest installment of the Lara Croft saga that only got optimized drivers a day or so back too late to make this review round. The game does not reinvent the wheel as far as graphics are concerned, although it does look very nice during gameplay.

NVIDIA’s new Titan is the Crème De La Crème of single card solutions and the only drawback to getting one is the fact you have to sell a kidney just to afford one. AMD’s current king of the ring is the HD 7970 GHz 6GB Edition, which is priced at around $600.00 US and priced about $300.00 less than the Titan and that has to be taken into consideration in the end game. We used the Sapphire Toxic Edition HD 7970 GHz 6GB card that is one of the best cards in the 7970 lineup against the Titan, as they resembled each other the most as far as price and features are concerned. The only 7970 more expensive are the Ares II cards, which are near impossible to get now, as stock was low initially with a 1,000 piece limit.

Since I have built my Red Dawn Extreme system, we have been using it as our test bench and the Dual E5-2660 2.2GHz Xeon’s seem to actually cause a slight bottleneck in performance when compared to my i7 -3960 system which seems to get about 15 FPS more than the Red Dawn. Right now we are really just waiting for Haswell to come out before we switch test stations again and since we are running all the cards again on the Xeon system the scores will all be correct as far as comparison values go. I was surprised to see that the Xeons actually did cause a bottleneck, but the CPUs are geared more for the Workstation environment so its not mind blowing to see. Some games like Far Cry 3 will not work with dual Xeons and give an error when trying to play the game. One thing of note though, the Sapphire 7970 card ran a lot cooler than the Titan under load and is the one area it wins.

You can perceive from the tests that the NVIDIA Titan does indeed beat the paint off the Sapphire Toxic Edition in every test across the board, but I really did not expect the results to be anything except what they were due to the Titan being new and the 7970 is aging. We ran all the tests a minimum of 3 times and then balanced the scores for accuracy, which although is very time oriented is still necessary. So far we have tested the Titan against the GTX 690, a pair of GTX 680s and now the HD 7970 Ghz Edition with only the GTX 690 being able to come up with a better score and then again that card being a dual GPU solution. NVIDIA keeps updating the drivers every few weeks with improvements in performance and we should see even more being squeezed out of it as they drivers further mature. At this point a driver will not make the HD 7970 GHz faster than the Titan, but next week we will see what a pair of GHz cards can do in another Head-to-Head battle versus the Titan and see where the scores are for that battle. In any case you can clearly see who the victor is in this round of tests and the winner is clearly the Titan. Thanks for reading and being a part of our audience. Like always your thoughts and comments matter so please let me hear them below.