Titan RTX Deep Learning Benchmarks

December 26, 2018• 5 min read

Titan RTX vs. 2080 Ti vs. 1080 Ti vs. Titan Xp vs. Titan V vs. Tesla V100.

For this post, Lambda engineers benchmarked the Titan RTX's deep learning performance vs. other common GPUs. We measured the Titan RTX's single-GPU training performance on ResNet50, ResNet152, Inception3, Inception4, VGG16, AlexNet, and SSD. Multi-GPU training speeds are not covered.

TLDR;

Benchmarks were conducted on Lambda's deep learning workstation with 2x Titan RTX GPUs.

Titan RTX's FP32 performance is...

• ~8% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti
• ~47% faster than the GTX 1080 Ti
• ~31% faster than the Titan Xp
• ~4% faster than the Titan V
• ~14% slower than the Tesla V100 (32 GB)

when comparing # images processed per second while training.

Titan RTX's FP16 performance is...

• 21% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti
• 110% faster than the GTX 1080 Ti
• 92% faster than the Titan Xp
• 2% slower than the Titan V
• Stay tuned for comparison to the V100 (32 GB)

when comparing # images processed per second while training.

Pricing

• Titan RTX: $2,499.00 (source: NVIDIA's website)
• RTX 2080 Ti: ~$1,300.00 (source: Amazon)

Conclusion

• RTX 2080 Ti is the best GPU for Machine Learning / Deep Learning if... 11 GB of GPU memory is sufficient for your training needs (for many people, it is). The 2080 Ti offers the best price/performance among the Titan RTX, Tesla V100, Titan V, GTX 1080 Ti, and Titan Xp.
• Titan RTX is the best GPU for Machine Learning / Deep Learning if... 11 GB of memory isn't sufficient for your training needs. However, before concluding this, try training at half-precision (16-bit). This effectively doubles your GPU memory at the cost of training accuracy. If you're already successfully training at FP16 and 11 GB still isn't enough, then choose the Titan RTX -- otherwise, go with the RTX 2080 Ti. At half-precision, the Titan RTX offers effectively 48 GB of GPU memory.
• Tesla V100 is the best GPU for Machine Learning / Deep Learning if... price isn't important, you need every bit of GPU memory available, or time to market of your product is of utmost importance.

Methods

• All models were trained on a synthetic dataset to isolate GPU performance from CPU pre-processing performance and reduce spurious I/O bottlenecks.
• For each GPU/model pair, 10 training experiments were conducted and then averaged.
• The "Normalized Training Performance" of a GPU is calculated by dividing its images / sec performance on a specific model by the images / sec performance of the 1080 Ti on that same model.
• The Titan RTX, 2080 Ti, Titan V, and V100 benchmarks utilized Tensor Cores.

Batch-sizes

Software

• Ubuntu 18.04
• TensorFlow: v1.11.0
• CUDA: 10.0.130
• cuDNN: 7.4.1
• NVIDIA Driver: 415.25

Raw Results

The tables below display the raw performance of each GPU while training in FP32 mode (single precision) and FP16 mode (half-precision), respectively. Note that the unit measured is # of images processed per second and we rounded results to the nearest integer.

FP32 - Number of images processed per second

FP16 - Number of images processed per second

Reproduce the benchmarks yourself

All benchmarking code is available on Lambda's GitHub repo. Share your results by emailing s@lambdalabs.com or tweeting @LambdaAPI. Be sure to include the hardware specifications of the machine you used.

Step One: Clone benchmark repo

git clone https://github.com/lambdal/lambda-tensorflow-benchmark.git --recursive

Step Two: Run benchmark

• Input a proper gpu_index (default 0) and num_iterations (default 10)

cd lambda-tensorflow-benchmark
./benchmark.sh gpu_index num_iterations

Step Three: Report results

• Check the repo directory for folder -.logs (generated by benchmark.sh)
• Use the same num_iterations in benchmarking and reporting.

./report.sh <cpu>-<gpu>.logs num_iterations