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Hardware Canucks tests the Titan Z

Would the latest AMD drivers have made any difference here realistically? The "highlights(I assume this means release notes)" don't include any of the games that were included in the review.
 
295x2 all day long. Hardware Canucks just have a few GameWorks titles in their lineup (like TechReport) and crossfire never works or scales well on hardly any GameWorks titles, aside from Watchdogs funnily enough. It's no surprise, in most non gameworks titles the 295x2 takes it to the cleaners though and every other review shows this pretty much.
 
Kaapstad said:
Too slow.
Rubbish cooler.
Poor overclocking.
Only 2x8 pin power connectors.
Overpriced.

And the Titan Z is even worse.:D
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I wouldn't class faster than 780TI SLI and faster than 290X Crossfire as too slow and doing it at a much quieter noise level too. No arguments about the price though, but a 690 was only a couple of hundred pounds cheaper. Dual gpu cards are never cheap or cost effective, aside from the 7990 which was a bargain once the price came down. The 295x2 is still the fastest card out there at the end of the day.
 
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Where is it faster than 780Ti SLI? lol. Tomb Raider and Thief results, both AMD games the 780s are faster.


It does depend on the resolution though. I won't defend the Ti all that much as at 4K I know which one given the choice I would choose
 
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MjFrosty said:
Where is it faster than 780Ti SLI? lol. Tomb Raider and Thief results, both AMD games the 780s are faster.


It does depend on the resolution though. I won't defend the Ti all that much as at 4K I know which one given the choice I would choose
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It's closer at 1440P and can swing either way depending on the game tested, but at 4K it's a landslide in favour of the 295x2 and AMD cards in general.

1440P and 4K seems to be what most sites say.

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_radeon_r9_295x2_review,17.html
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2014/04/08/amd_radeon_r9_295x2_video_card_review/13#.U7ztB_ldV4A
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphi...-Card-Review/Power-Sound-and-Closing-Thoughts
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-radeon-r9-295x2-review

HardOCP said:
4K display gaming has proven to be a demanding gaming scenario where even the fastest high-end GPUs in dual-GPU configuration aren't enough to provide the highest settings in games. Our 4K testing has put these video card configurations to the test. There was only one game that had the same gameplay experience between all three configurations, Tomb Raider. This only occurred because the next higher AA setting was SSAA, which bottlenecked all three configurations. There was still a large performance difference between the configurations.

All of the other games showed that there were distinct gameplay experience differences between all three configurations. The video card that provided the best experience all around was the new AMD Radeon R9 295X2. In every game, we were able to achieve the highest playable settings with it along with the fastest performance.

In BF4 we could play at 3840x2160 with 2X MSAA and "Ultra" setting with HBAO enabled. Whereas, AMD R9 290X CrossFire and GTX 780 Ti SLI had to turn off Ambient Occlusion to be playable. In Crysis 3 we were able to play at 3840x2160 with SMAA MGPU 2X at "High" settings compared to SMAA 1X on the GTX 780 Ti SLI. In Far Cry 3 we were able to play at 3840x2160 with 2X MSAA and "Ultra" settings versus "Very High" and "High" on the AMD R9 290X CF and GTX 780 Ti SLI respectively.
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Pcper said:
It seems like we are saying this more often than ever before, but the new AMD Radeon R9 295X2 is clearly the fastest graphics card for gaming on the planet. With a pair of full-speed Hawaii GPUs running at over 1.0 GHz on 5,632 stream processors and 8GB of total graphics memory, the R9 295X2 impresses on the list of specifications and then does so again and again in our gaming testing. In only a couple of cases did the pair of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti cards running in SLI outperform the R9 295X2 at 2560x1440 (GRID 2 and Skyrim) and only once did it happen when running at the ultimate flagship resolution, 3840x2160 (Skyrim).

Everywhere else, the Radeon R9 295X2 presented a dominant performance with gaming frame rates that were both fast and surprisingly consistent! Anyone that debates the value of the storm created by PC Perspective and other sites about smooth, low variance frame times needs to be taken off the Internet. We, as a community, forced a company to recognize its faults and fix them and because of that we have a much better product with the R9 295X2 than we would have otherwise. AMD has progressed enough to even offer better frame pacing than NVIDIA's SLI in several instances including Battlefield 4 and Bioshock Infinite.

While performance between the R9 295X2 and the pair of GTX 780 Ti cards in SLI is somewhat close at 2560x1440, when we tested at 4K (3840x2160) the benefits of the dual Hawaii card were much more prevalent. Even in GRID 2, where performance at the lower resolution gave the edge to NVIDIA, that shifted to AMD at the 4K level.
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Guru3D said:
One word - Breathtaking, period. Really I should stop right here. I was impressed by the overall gaming performance as there simply is not one game that can not deal with this card. And that is at the very best image quality settings. And you do it all with a nice 30" monitor of course, at 2560x1440/1600. I mean BioShock infinite at Ultra quality levels are still oozing performance. For those with Ultra High Definition gaming in mind, the 295x2 is the first real card I could recommend, it will simply make a lot of sense. Yeah, it would be a sweet spot and you'd have 4 GB of graphics memory per GPU. The FCAT results show that AMD has delivered and offers as promised, the overall frametimes look really good with a small anomaly here and there
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DigitalFoundry said:
Well, the good news is that the R9 295X2 isn't just the most powerful graphics card we've ever tested in terms of teraflops or benchmarks, it fulfils its primary purpose very well indeed - you can get a great 4K experience from it, and at 1440p the performance is simply stunning.

That goes beyond the benchmarks. The gameplay experience is good, stutter is minimalised as well as a dual-GPU solution can be (and may even be marginally improved over Nvidia based on a quick FCAT comparison with the 780 set-up in SLI) - and yes, while extreme GPU power requires an outrageous cooling solution and a mammoth power supply, the reality is that the end result is stunning. Trades are required to hit consistent, high frame-rates in cutting-edge games, but the fact that we can enjoy a stupendous Battlefield 4 experience at 4K from a single graphics card speaks to the extent of the achievement here.
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295x2 & Mantle running low on vram in that Guru3D screenshot above i bet. :D
 
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humbug said:
I agree about Canuks, yes. i have a lot of respect for them

I would always use the latest drivers, even if that means running the tests all over again every time, if i proclaim to inform my readers then i would be sure to give my readers the most up-to-date information available to me, otherwise its just poor quality journalism. Not something that i would be proud of, especially if i'm a professional being in one form or another paid for it.

IMO they let this one slip.
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I understand what you're getting at, but I (personally) don't see the point in doing every test again unless its a major performance driver i.e. 12.11 or 337.88 or fixes something fundamentally broken etc...as someone pointed out above, a driver that may up perf in one game may drag it down in another, so swings and roundabouts really. So unless 14.6 has magically increased perf +10% across the board then its probably not worth the reviewer looking at for now.
 
LtMatt said:
I wouldn't class faster than 780TI SLI and faster than 290X Crossfire as too slow and doing it at a much quieter noise level too.
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When it's slightly faster than reference 290X Xfire and £300 more than after-market 290X Xfire then most would say it is defiantly too slow for the money.

Considering that for the cost of the cheapest 295X2 you can get a pair of 290X gaming, and water cool them, and the CPU, then it's defiantly a bad choice for anyone with a normal sized case.

The Titan-Z ofc is a bad buy for anybody ^^
 
ubersonic said:
When it's slightly faster than reference 290X Xfire and £300 more than after-market 290X Xfire then most would say it is defiantly too slow for the money.

Considering that for the cost of the cheapest 295X2 you can get a pair of 290X gaming, and water cool them, and the CPU, then it's defiantly a bad choice for anyone with a normal sized case.

The Titan-Z ofc is a bad buy for anybody ^^
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As with all dual gpu's they're only for a niche market, I'd still like one though. At full load it's as quiet as 780TI SLI reference at idle, what's not to like? Just wish it was a bit cheaper. Maybe it will have a price drop eventually like the 7990 did.

pgi947 said:
I understand what you're getting at, but I (personally) don't see the point in doing every test again unless its a major performance driver i.e. 12.11 or 337.88 or fixes something fundamentally broken etc...as someone pointed out above, a driver that may up perf in one game may drag it down in another, so swings and roundabouts really. So unless 14.6 has magically increased perf +10% across the board then its probably not worth the reviewer looking at for now.
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14.6 did have some large performance improvements actually, especially for crossfire. It's not that important though, we can just look at other reviews and as you said, they may have done testing earlier before the 14.6's were ready.
 
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A lot of the performance improvements never get listed. There are gains on Sleeping Dogs and other titles in Quad,Tri and Xfire but none of that is mentioned in the notes. They should definitely sell those improvements a bit better.
 
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