Conclusion
First of all lets talk about prices. Let's consider that
the two GTX 760 DirectCU II OC together cost 427 Euro. Compare that to the
massive 832 Euro the GeForce GTX Titan costs. Basically, a card that is slower
than two other cards combined, costs almost twice as much. This puts things into
perspective how overpriced the GeForce GTX Titan actually is. Sure, nowadays the
GTX 780 Ti is out where the cheapest price is 579 Euro these days, which is
still a whopping 152 Euro more than the two custom GTX 760 cards we've been
using for this comparison. And still, even the GTX 780 Ti isn't faster than the
two smaller cards in SLI but about that we're going to talk in another article.
To dive a bit deeper into the results, we start with performance differences in
3DMark where we see that the SLI of two GTX 760 is a whopping 23 percent faster
than the mighty GTX Titan. In the next theoretical test we ran, Unigine Heaven,
we see that the two 760's are on average 16 percent quicker than the GTX Titan.
In case of games, the range goes from 3 percent in The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim to
38 percent difference in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, which in other words means,
that it goes from nothing to massive. One drawback of the two small cards
certainly is the fact, they only feature 2 Gigabyte of GDDR5 memory and the GTX
Titan comes with no less than 6 Gigabyte. Especially at ultra high resolutions
this is going to be an advantage for the Titan, since the two GTX 760 will run
out of graphics memory quite soon, when trying to keep boatloads of large
textures in the memory. But luckily there are 4 Gigabyte versions of the GTX
760, which cost about 20 Euro more than the 2 Gigabyte cards, which in total is
an additional 40 Euro to the 427 Euro we mentioned at the beginning of this
conclusion.
To tell you the entire story, deciding between a GTX Titan and an SLI of GTX
760's is bit a double edged blade. The bad thing about the Titan is, that it's
ridiculously expensive but on the other hand there are also bad things about the
two 760's. In case of the particular models we tested, the graphics memory is
too small for the performance delivered, there will be the usual SLI issues,
although NVIDIA is taking quite good care of that and last but no least there is
the power consumption which is 56 percent higher than with one single Titan.
Other than that there is the GTX 780 Ti - to which we will compare the two 760's
soon - that features a more "moderate" price tag. If you're actually thinking
about buying two GTX 760's make sure you go for models with 4 Gigabyte VRAM
otherwise the performance advantage compared to the mighty Titan as well as 780
Ti will shrink drastically when playing games at ultra high resolutions.
The following is my very personal opinion. I've always bee a bit of a fan of
"SLIiny" mid-range cards, since sometime, you get really good performance for
the money. Sure there is the drawback with power consumption but honestly having
two cards in a gaming PC is simply cooler than just having one. I'm well aware
that it's ridiculous but isn't the the ridiculous things on this planet that are
the most awesome?