In 2013, Nvidia surprised the gaming world by announcing a ludicrously priced $999 GPU with its first GTX Titan. It was the flagship single-GPU offering for its Kepler GPU family (compared with the GTX 690), and it marked the first time a consumer GPU crossed the line into "supercomputer" territory, even though it offered only 6GB of memory. This former king of the GPU world has been benchmarked in 2024, and the benchmarks show it's no longer usable for modern games. It's safe to say in 2035 or so, the RTX 4090 will suffer a similar fate.
The GTX Titan was benchmarked by the German site PCGamesHardware, and it's an interesting look at how a former 800-pound gorilla of the GPU world fares 11 years later, especially compared with a modern entry-level GPU. It's important to remember the GTX Titan was an obscene GPU when it launched, with triple the memory of the GTX 680, which had only 2GB of GDDR5. It also had a 384-bit memory bus, which is still the norm today, and featured 2,688 cores and an 876MHz boost clock. It was twice as expensive as the GTX 680 and supported SLI, so people bought them in pairs for simply outrageous builds. The card had a 250W TDP built on a 28nm process.
The main issue with benchmarking this card in 2024 is it doesn't support DX12, which came out two years after it launched in 2015. This resulted in a blizzard of errors (above) trying to run modern games, and worse, Nvidia stopped supporting the GPU in drivers in 2021. These factors severely limited the number of games that could be tested to just 20 titles. The card can only run DX12 in software emulation, which is never a good option.
In benchmarks, the GTX Titan limped across the Crysis Remastered finish line at just 31fps in 1080p, while Cyberpunk 2077 was unplayable at just 12.3fps, without ray tracing. As Tom's Hardware notes, the card doesn't even support ray tracing, so this is unsurprising. Most games ran at around 20 to 30 fps, making them barely playable. The card's 6GB of memory wasn't an issue, at least at 1080p, but 1440p is a bridge too far.
The card's performance was improved by overclocking, though, as they could crank up the boost clock from 980MHz to a whopping 1.25GHz. This allowed performance to climb to 60fps in games like Psychonauts 2 and 40.9fps in Crysis Remastered. For a demanding game like Control, however, performance went from unplayable at 24fps to barely playable at 33fps.
Finally, it was surmised from testing that the GTX Titan is roughly equivalent to 2022's AMD Radeon RX 6400, a single-slot $159 GPU with 4GB of memory and a paltry 64-bit memory bus. The lowly Radeon offers almost the same performance as the stock GTX Titan across the suite of games, with the overclocked version outpacing it by a few frames here and there. It's a cruel fate for the formerly dominant GPU, which changed the industry forever.
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