Pitting Crysis 3 against the GeForce GTX Titan

Crytek’s latest does battle with Nvidia’s ‘Gaming Super Computer’

Today, hardware reviewers were able to lift the lid on NVIDIA’s latest beast, the GeForce GTX Titan. Boasting a GK110 chip with 2688 CUDA cores and loads of other stuff I barely understand, NVIDIA claims that when you rock three of these things in SLI, you get the world’s first gaming super computer. 

So far, so prideful. 

With a trio of these behemoths, my job was simple. I’m a software guy — I make other people do my hardware stuff, and then play I games. Crysis 3 is one such game, and with Crytek suggesting next generation consoles won’t touch what its latest first-person shooter in the graphics department, there’s no better test of the Titan’s mettle.

The above video (nabbed with FRAPS) shows Crysis 3 running at 60fps on max settings and, while YouTube doesn’t quite do it justice, you ought to be able to get the general idea. At a resolution of 1920×1280 (aiming for higher in the near future), the Titan largely has no trouble getting Crysis 3 to look as good as all those pretty screenshots Crytek loves to shove down our mouths, all while maintaining a smooth sixty frames of arrow-slingin’ mayhem. 

Crysis 3 doesn’t really care about your hardware situation, callously tossing out intense rainstorms and huge fields of swaying grass like so much computer-shredding confetti. Thus armed with this hardware, however, I laugh at Crytek, laugh loudly while jiggling my fat around and burping up various acidic liquids — such is my new decadence. Speaking of which, here’s the rig Origin PC (not EA’s Origin, damn that confusion!) put together to test everything:

Chassis: Corsair 800D
Motherboard: Intel DX79SR (SATA6Gb/s USB 3.0)
Processor: Intel Core i7 3930K LGA 2011 Hex-Core Processor (12MB L3 Cache) with ORIGIN CRYOGENIC Custom Liquid Cooling CPU and ORIGIN PC Professional Overclocking to 4.9 GHZ
Graphics Cards: 3-WAY SLI NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN’s with ORIGIN CRYOGENIC LIQUID Cooling Solution and Professional Overclocking
Memory: 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1866Mhz
Hard Drive 1 and 2: DUAL 120 GB Corsair Neutron SSDs in RAID 0
Hard Drive 3: 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black SATA 6.0Gb/s, 7200RPM, 64MB Cache
Power Supply: 1.2 Kilowatt PSU Corsair
Optical Drive: 12X Blu-ray (BD) Disc Combo (Reads BD and Writes to DVD/CD)
Cyberlink Power DVD Playback Software
40 in 1 Media Card Reader
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate

Obviously what I have is a massive, expensive beast, and the Titan’s aren’t cheap. The recommended retail price for one of these things is $999, so if you want three of them, prepare to sell one of your children to the nearest friendly off-the-grid genetic research facility. It’ll have to be one of your good children too — dominant genes, healthy teeth, the works.

NVIDIA’s been keen to point out that you don’t need three cards and a humongous computer to get everything looking swish, and says a number of manufacturers are going to be making fast, powerful, but adorably small machines. That’s good news for those who don’t like their rigs taking up much space — personally I like them as big as I can get them, to make up for feelings of inadequacy in every single other aspect of my life. 

As much as I’ve loved rocking this thing, even the Titan breaks a sweat when the game decides to get really serious. In some of the most intense areas — chiefly some of the stormy kill zones in the campaign’s opening chapter — I’ve encountered some slowing down, with brief dips to 40fps. These moments are rare, in my experience, with the Titan ultimately shrugging off most of what Crysis 3 can throw at it. 

Due to some hardware errors that required fixing (caused by the fine delivery people of Mississippi and their inability to read “FRAGILE” on a box), I’ve not had as much time as I’d have liked before providing my initial experience, but rest assured I’ll be spending a lot more with it over the coming days. The Titan has become the way to play Crysis 3, and I can’t wait to see how it holds up going forward. 

Stay tuned to Destructoid for a full on PC Port Report, detailing how good a job the master race version of Crysis 3 is when compared to its console brethren (spoiler: a pretty damn good job!)