In 2013, the very first GTX Titan was truly the Holy Grail! This high-performance card boasted a huge memory capacity: 6 GB! At the time, everyone was crazy… until NVIDIA unveiled the retail price: $999, oof. That’s all water under the bridge now, and 11 years on, how’s that old card faring?
GTX Titan: on a par with an RX 6400…
Owning a first-generation Titan at the moment is only of interest for collecting purposes. Indeed, with this model, you can’t launch much of anything, and for good reason: DirectX 12 compatibility is a problem. Our colleagues at PCGamesHardware have been paying the price: Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty, Forza… Anything that runs under this API, you forget. In the end, the card could only be tested on games running under DirectX 11.
And in this respect, the card has clearly had its day. Today, as we can see, it can only compete with the entry-level offer. On Anno 1800, it performs as well as an AMD RX 6400 when it’s not behind on The Witcher III… And by a long way. Overclocking should be considered if you hope to overtake AMD’s little card.
And even then, to offer this level of performance, it has to be done with incredibly high power consumption compared to the 6400. Looking at old tests, a GTX Titan averages 200W of power consumption, compared with around 50 watts for the RX 6400… And that’s without mentioning the noise emitted by the heatsink blower or the temperatures reached by the card.
In short, while buying a second-hand card that’s one or two generations old may be worthwhile depending on the price, buying a model that’s more than a decade out of date makes no sense… Except for collectors who want to get the most powerful GPUs of their era, or to satisfy that nostalgic side we all harbor.