Titan RTX’s backplate isn't just for looks. Nvidia incorporates the plate into its cooling concept by sandwiching thermal pads between the metal and PCB, behind where you'd find memory modules up front. The company probably could have done without the pad under TU102, though: our measurements showed no difference when we removed it.

It should come as no surprise that the same PCB, same components, same cooler, and same dimensions yield a card weighing the same as GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, too. Our Titan RTX registers 2lb. 14.6 oz. (1.322kg) on a scale. Even the sticker on the back of Titan RTX says GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Nvidia differentiates the card aesthetically with a matte gold (rather than silver) finish, with polished gold accents around the fans and shroud. A shiny gold Titan logo on the top edge glows white under power.

How We Tested Titan RTX

Benchmarking Titan RTX is a bit more complex than a typical gaming graphics card. Because we ran professional visualization, deep learning, and gaming workloads, we ended up utilizing multiple machines to satisfy the requirements of those disparate applications.

To facilitate deep learning testing, we set up a Core i7-8086K (6C/12T) CPU on a Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Ultra Gaming motherboard. All four of its memory slots were populated with 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX modules at DDR4-2400, giving us 64GB total. Then, we loaded Ubuntu 18.04 LTS onto a 1.6TB Intel SSD DC P3700. Titan RTX is compared to Titan V, Titan Xp, and GeForce RTX 2080 Ti in these benchmarks.

For professional visualization, we set up a Core i7-8700K (6C/12T) CPU on an MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC motherboard. Again, all four of its memory slots were populated with 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX modules at DDR4-2400, giving us 64GB total. Then, we loaded Windows 10 Professional onto a 1.2TB Intel SSD 750-series drive. Incidentally, this is the same system running our Powenetics software for power consumption measurement. Titan RTX is compared to Titan V, Titan Xp, and GeForce RTX 2080 Ti in these benchmarks.

Finally, we collect gaming results on the same Core i7-7700K used in previous reviews. It populates an MSI Z170 Gaming M7 motherboard, which also hosts G.Skill’s F4-3000C15Q-16GRR memory kit. Crucial’s MX200 SSD remains, joined by a 1.6TB Intel DC P3700 loaded down with games. Titan RTX is compared to Gigabyte’s Aorus GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Xtreme 11G, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition, Titan V, GeForce RTX 2080, GeForce RTX 2080, GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, Titan X, GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, GeForce GTX 1070, Radeon RX Vega 64, and Radeon RX Vega 56 in these benchmarks.

All of those cards are tested at 2560x1440 and 3840x2160 in Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, Battlefield V, Destiny 2, Far Cry 5, Forza Motorsport 7, Grand Theft Auto V, Metro: Last Light Redux, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Tom Clancy’s The Division, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, The Witcher 3, and Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.

We invited AMD to submit a more compute-oriented product for our deep learning and workstation testing. However, company representatives didn’t respond after initially looking into the request. Fortunately, we should have Radeon VII to test very soon.

The testing methodology we're using comes from PresentMon: Performance In DirectX, OpenGL and Vulkan. In short, these games are evaluated using a combination of OCAT and our own in-house GUI for PresentMon, with logging via GPU-Z.

As we generate new data, we’re using the latest drivers. For Linux, that meant using 415.18 for Titan RTX and Titan V, and then 410.93 for Titan Xp. Under Windows 10, we went with Nvidia’s 417.26 press driver for Titan RTX, 417.22 for Gigabyte’s card, 416.33 For GeForce RTX 2070, and 411.51 for 2080/2080 Ti FE. Older Pascal-based boards were tested with build 398.82. Titan V’s results were spot-checked with 411.51 to ensure performance didn’t change. AMD’s cards utilize Crimson Adrenalin Edition 18.8.1 (except for the Battlefield V and Wolfenstein tests, which are tested with Adrenalin Edition 18.11.2).

Special thanks to Noctua for sending over a batch of NH-D15S heat sinks with fans. These top all three systems, giving us consistency in effective, quiet cooling.

Performance Results: Pro Visualization

ArionBench

Madrid-based RandomControl offers the Arion Render physically-based path tracing render engine and ArionFX, composed of HDR image processing algorithms. ArionBench is meant as a proxy for the former, measuring GPU and CPU performance through a light simulation in a 3D scene.

The benchmark package includes executables for testing available GPUs, CPUs, and a hybrid combination of the two.


This CUDA-accelerated workload runs best on Titan RTX, followed by GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Titan V trails the gaming card by about 100 points in the hardware-only test, while Titan Xp finishes far behind the more modern boards.

LuxMark v.3.1

The latest version of LuxMark is based on an updated LuxRender 1.5 render engine, which specifically incorporates OpenCL optimizations that invalidate comparisons to previous versions of the benchmark.

We tested all three scenes available in the 64-bit benchmark: LuxBall HDR (with 217,000 triangles), Neumann TLM-102 SE (with 1,769,000 triangles), and Hotel Lobby, with 4,973,000 triangles).


Turing and Volta GPUs trade blows depending on the scene you look at. Titan V scores a win in LuxBall and Hotel Lobby, while the two TU102-based boards score higher in Neumann TLM-102 SE. The main takeaway, however, seems to be that Titan Xp is limited to a fraction of the performance achieved by the newer cards.

Cinema4D

ProRender is another physically-based GPU render engine. Unlike Arion Render, however, it utilizes OpenCL. It’s also biased, meaning the renderer’s output is based on estimations rather than pixel-by-pixel calculations. Arion Render is unbiased, performing calculations on every pixel and in turn taking longer.


In both of our test scenes, Titan RTX is faster than its Nvidia-sourced competition.

On-board memory doesn’t seem to be a factor, since GeForce RTX 2080 Ti easily beats Titan Xp with 1GB less capacity. It’s more likely that Turing/Volta’s compute performance, increased number of schedulers, on-die SRAM advantage, and higher memory bandwidth convey big gains over the older Pascal architecture.

OctaneRender

The latest version of OTOY’s OctaneRender incorporates support for out-of-core geometry, meaning meshes and textures can be stored in system memory while the unbiased GPU renderer works at interactive speeds.


One of Titan RTX’s big selling points is its 24GB of GDDR6. Thus far, our benchmarks haven’t shown a need for that much on-board memory. However, the first test we ran in OctaneRender repeatedly crashed on Titan V and Titan Xp due to running out of memory. A simpler scene allowed us to create a valid comparison, but not before we got our first taste of capacity envy.

Just because we completed runs on the competing cards didn’t mean their outcomes made much sense, though. It’s plausible that GeForce RTX 2080 Ti’s 11GB put it at a disadvantage to Titan Xp’s 12GB, tipping the scale in favor of Pascal. However, Titan V shouldn’t have suffered such a high render time (and low memory utilization number) with just as much RAM. In bouncing ideas back and forth with Nvidia, we could only hypothesize an issue with Titan V’s HBM2 memory subsystem not playing nice with OctaneRender.