We've already covered the features of Nvidia's GeForce GTX Titan, the $1,000 GK110-powered beast set to exist alongside GeForce GTX 690. Now it's time to benchmark the board in one-, two-, and three-way SLI. Is it better than four GK104s working together?
Two days ago, we gave you our first look at a beastly single-GPU graphics board in Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan 6 GB: GK110 On A Gaming Card. For some reason, the company wanted to split discussion of Titan’s specs and its performance across two days. That’s not the direction I would have gone (had I been asked for my opinion, that is). But after knocking out several thousand words on the first piece and benchmarking for a week straight in the background, cutting our coverage in half didn’t bother me as much.
The article about the gaming industry is interesting,. In my opinion, the gaming industry is not in trouble, the way that people play games is just changing. Why would you pay $60 for a game that you can only play once while you're sitting on your couch at home? I can buy 20 games on my iPad or iPhone and not be restricted to my couch plus I can share the game with my friends. There is also the explosive growth of PC gaming to be mentioned. Have you heard of League of Legends? It's only the most played game in the world. It has on average 3 million concurrent players. This link is from October and has an interesting info graphic that gives you an idea of the scale of the game. The interesting thing is that LoL is 100% free to play. The game industry is having to change their business model to compete with games that are F2P and mobile games that cost less than $5 yet have high replay value.
It almost feels like they're re-marketing the GTX 690 in the new Titan. The 690 has almost the same specs, 5 GB GDDR5 boost clock of 1015, as with the Titan at 6 GB GDDR5 at 876 boost clocked. 3 way SLI for both for four $1,000 video cards. I'd still prefer the GTX 690, though, due to the extra cuda cores it provides per video card.
Obviously with recent tragedies and the need lay blame it should be expected that this year the gaming industry was going to be in the spotlight. I however don't think it is in trouble either, nor is it to be blamed.
I haven't been online gaming for all that long and only game on my PC. I started towards the end of COD2 and although I had COD4, I pretty much jumped into COD5 the day it was released. I also have Black Ops but never liked it from the start and have only played online for maybe 10 hours.
From what I have seen in my short gaming life is that the attention level drops because the maps get "boring" for some. Then there's the huge hype of the new latest game launch which then starts to draw off the volume of potential players. We now also have the Free games like World of Tanks tossed in as well.
We all know how the Activisions of the world make their money which is why there's always the next greatest thing every year. I haven't played the free ones but I assume other than purchasing upgrades there must be advertising that must be viewed in order to play.........at least I think there would be?
So the game producers need to continue to grow profits but how? In the past they just shlep out the next version and discontinue supporting the previous game. When the game turns out to be a dud your choices are limited. Go back to the previous game with the "boring" maps, continue playing the dud or by another game. Of course buying the new game is what they want, but how many duds does one person buy before they catch on? If it's free then all you've invested is playing time and if you don't like it..........so what?
Although I haven't played it I hear the guys on TS talk about the "map pack" expansion kits. The skeptic in me always thinks first "Why did they do it this way?" knowing that it's all about the money and not how much fun it will be. I like the idea and it made me think of COD2 when guys could make their own maps. I played some that were absolutely fantastic, which showed some amazing creativity. To me the game could be still fresh if the graphics were modern because the maps could be new all the time. I don't know the difference in price between the original game and the expansion kit but it seems to me they have now put a price on maps. I'm not even sure that's relevant now or in the future though?
I like the idea of in game familiarity but I also get that some people get bored and need to move on no matter what. So why don't the game producers do both? The single player game is a campaign you work through to finish. I'm a WWII freak so I'll use that as an example.
My country and a few others in the world fought for 6 years, from 1939-1945. Using the "map expansion" idea the game could be supported on a year by year basis with new maps and weapons that were relevant to that current year in history. There are endless theatres of war and potential maps. They don't even need to include vehicles like planes, ships and tanks although they could. Maybe this would also allow the companies to repair game glitches and tweaks at a cost lower than a total new game development along the way, making it more profitable and a better game?
That's just my opinion and I have no idea if it would be graphically doable. In the end it's all about money and growth. We have the money and they want as much of it as they can get every year.
