Nvidia releases $3000 Titan Z

http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/03/25/titan-z/

by Aeolus98 • 12 years ago

64 72 12 years ago

blogs.nvidia.com

This card is more expensive than all the hardware in my current PC, and I am running pretty high end gaming rig with 900D, GTX 680, 3700K, xonar, 16 GB of RAM, roomy SSD, velociraptor, Johny Guru 5 star rated PSU, and custom built water cooling.

fourmii• 12 years ago

Out of interest, what do you play on this rig?

soperj• 12 years ago

probably 2048.

jksmith• 12 years ago

Goat Simulator will be off the hook.

aeturnum• 12 years ago

Whatever he wants :)

TrainedMonkey3• 12 years ago

Heavily modded skyrim.

michael_h• 12 years ago

One of the worst things about owning a high-end gaming rig is watching it's inevitable decline to a 'standard desktop'. Bittersweet.

just2n• 12 years ago

It's up there with the price of my enthusiast RIVB, 4930k, 2x GTX 780 Ti, 64GB 2133 RAM, 256GB Samsung 840 PRO...

Seems silly.

Aeolus982• 12 years ago

IMHO the only reason you'd want this is to save on a PCIe slot when you absolutely need the double-precision floating point operations to run at full speed.

imperialdrive• 12 years ago

The only reason to by this card is to get full QHD/4K porn in 3D, to pass the time while simultaneously mining bitcoin.

Wohui• 12 years ago

You may have identified quite an audience.

skriticos22• 12 years ago

The Bitcoin network is currently hashing at nearly 500 exa-flops (estimated). This thing has what, 8 tera-flops? Not very effective.

trhway2• 12 years ago

interesting what human computing endeavor has first crossed 10-20 exa-flops - the estimate of computing power of the brain. 500 exa-flops is something that would be enough to emulate the brain.

circa• 12 years ago

I'm ok with porn at 60fps at almost any resolution.

breischl• 12 years ago

I don't track gaming GPU requirements that much, but this strikes me as past high end. Is this even useful for gaming, or is it really aimed at doing crypto, cryptocurrency mining, simulations, etc?

Aeolus982• 12 years ago

Its mainly used for the DP floating point that isn't limited artificially. The titan supercomputer at ORNL uses an older version of these. So heavy compute.

Guvante• 12 years ago

4k gaming is actually extremely painful performance wise and that is assuming a single monitor.

bvk• 12 years ago

The thing to note about this card is that it's a dual-GPU card - two chips with some sort of intra-card PCIE bus between them. You could get equivalent gaming performance by buying two of the GTX 780 Ti for about $1500. That level of performance is roughly what you want if you want to game at 4k resolutions at 60 FPS, so there are gaming applications for this card, even if it falls into "insanely high-end". The niche for this sort of card is in mini-ITX and similarly small computers, where there isn't enough room for a pair of cards and the builder wants "throwing money away" levels of performance.

That said, the selling point of the Titan cards is that their GPUs don't have the same restrictions put on their general-purpose compute performance as the standard gamer cards. NVIDIA locks this performance on their geforce cards in order to protect their lucrative GPGPU business, so this is really more of an entry-level card for scientific computing and other applications.

Cryptocurrency mining would be an obvious application, but a quirk of NVIDIA and AMD's differing architectures means that AMD cards are vastly more powerful at the specific functions needed to mine cryptocoins.

macavity23• 12 years ago

While a few years ago this card would have been great at mining cryptocoins, nowadays no gpu is ever going to be worth it as ASICs are 2-3 orders of magnitude faster and more efficient.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

ASIC won't play skyrim @ 4k though... :)

augbot• 12 years ago

Mmmmmm, OpenCL.

makmanalp• 12 years ago

Wow, I bet the cost / benefit ratio on this one is not so great for most applications. Just wait a year till a minutely pared-down version is available for 10% the price.

binxbolling• 12 years ago

I will eat a shoe if this is available in 12 months for $300.

hackerpolicy• 12 years ago

Be glad this is not reddit.

Aqwis• 12 years ago

It mentions supercomputers, but also gaming. Supercomputers aren't known for being particularly good for gaming, to put it that way. Is this product just a new gaming GPU, or is it aimed at a different market, even altcoin miners?

United857• 12 years ago

Real-time shading/rendering is essentially a massively parallel operation -- the exact type of problems that GPUs (and supercomputers in general) are good for.

In fact, many of the top supercomputers today use GPUs.

boyaka• 12 years ago

Yep. And it would probably be good for altcoins indeed. It just can't be a good bitcoin miner because the ASICs are already out there. If an altcoin can be mined with an ASIC (I believe the purpose of some, like litecoin, are not to be?) then it is near pointless to mine with a GPU (unless in a pool).

Also, I would assume the reason behind supercomputers not being good for gaming is that they are parallelized in ways other than the chips on the GPU (entire machines are networked together via various interfaces). The software behind distributing the processing between several machines, or whatever aspect makes it super, is probably what limits the ability of supercomputers to run video games :0

bitkrieg• 12 years ago

Prestige. Both for Nvida and buyers, having the fastest graphics card on the market.

kenrikm• 12 years ago

I'm on 660TIs in SLI which are not the newest horse in the stable and can run just about anything out maxed (16x AA etc.) @ 1080p. You won't need this card unless you're going multi monitor and / or retina level.

izzydata3• 12 years ago

Am I the only one that hates the term "retina"? Just give a resolution. It is way more meaningful than pointless apple magic lingo.

jjoonathan• 12 years ago

If it takes "retina" to get rid of "HD," no amount of silliness will keep me off its bandwagon.

mixmastamyk• 12 years ago

Perhaps 200+ dpi or the equivalent in metric.

jjcm• 12 years ago

Keep in mind that even if you're maxing the in-game settings, you aren't maxing out the image quality fully. You can still go beyond that with supersampling (essentially rendering at a higher resolution, then downscaling to your monitor's resolution in order to prevent aliasing). Standard anti-aliasing tries to detect edges in order to find specific parts of the image to supersample, but it isn't perfect. If you want the best image quality possible, supersampling is the way to go.

The downside though is that it's extremely resource intensive. Even 16x MSAA antialiasing is faster than 2x supersampling. With supersampling, at 2x on 1080p you're rendering at 3840x2160 then scaling down to 1080p - effectively the same as gaming on 4k.

I have two rigs, one with dual r9 270s and another with SLI'd gtx 760s. Each can run dota 2 at 2560x1600 with 2x supersampling at around 40 and 30fps respectively.

The image quality is beautiful, don't get me wrong, but even those cards in an SLI isn't enough to push that amount of pixels.

With quad Titan Z's, you could probably do 4x supersampling - nearing the quality you'd get with source film maker, but in real time.

izzydata3• 12 years ago

Personally I find having a higher frame rate in faster paced game is far more important than having a diagonal line be perfectly smooth. In the middle of a game you'd never be concerned with how perfect the image looks.

bri3d2• 12 years ago

I think this card is aimed at the compute crowd.

However, there is an extension of "multi monitor" that's probably going to become a big thing: VR gaming. VR gaming demands both more pixels and a consistent, high framerate, and could percolate more quickly down from "most hardcore of the hardcore" to "many people who enjoy gaming own one" than 4K displays or huge monitor stacks have.

This particular GPU is a multi-GPU single-card solution which is probably worse for VR, because alternate-frame rendering adds latency and can result in uneven frame timings especially when two sequential frames have dramatically different complexity.

maaku• 12 years ago

Wouldn't you render the two frames at the same time on separate cards?

Thaxll• 12 years ago

You can't, plus the fact that lot of games don't work well with SLI.

dippyskoodlez2• 12 years ago

Work well, or show significant performance gains?

Because I haven't found a single game that doesn't work or has SLI specific bugs. Crossfire however....

dippyskoodlez2• 12 years ago

My dual 670s handles 5760x1200 pretty well.

rangibaby• 12 years ago

I imagine this is how the Titan Z came about: > We finally have a GPU that can get 60fps in Crysis at 1080p > What about 4K? > ...

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

Dual-GPU...so not very good for VR gaming. The only reason you'd want such an expensive high-end GPU is to be future proof with VR gaming at 4k/120fps. But dual-GPUs aren't great for VR gaming.

Nvidia needs another card between the normal Titan and this one, that's a single card, and is targeted at VR gaming, and costs $1500 at most.

DontGiveTwoFlux• 12 years ago

Why is Dual-GPU not ideal for VR?

Intuitively, one GPU per eyeball sounds like a good fit.

orik• 12 years ago

Most of the current comments are along the lines of "You will only need this card if you are doing _____". ie "Gaming at 4k", "Parallel Compute".

I think it's pretty clear this is a halo product, but I want to point out that having two non-crippled gpu's on a stick is an impressive technical achievement. Sure they will be throttled when the heat constraints kick in, but I am excited to see this sort of technology trickle down into the next "Asus 760 Mars" product.

sillysaurus32• 12 years ago

What's a halo product?

aqme28• 12 years ago

It's a product that raises perceived quality of the rest of the brand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect#Halo_effect_and_bra...

mbreedlove• 12 years ago

I believe orik is referring to the halo effect, a term used in marketing. It's the idea that when a customer has a positive experience with a companies products, they will likely choose that companies products in the future simply because of the past positive experience.

The idea is the customer thinks: "Look at this amazing product Nvidia is producing! They must have great engineers working on bleeding edge technology!".

Even if they don't buy the $3000 GPU, they now associate Nvidia with high quality GPUs which may influence them to buy Nvidia product in the future.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/halo-effect.asp

mikestew2• 12 years ago

An iPhone is a good example. Real life example: my wife bought an iPhone, I was impressed and bought one, which led to me buying a MacBook to do dev work (and because "hey, they do make good machines"), which led to a whole house full of Macs and various Apple gear.

Because they made what I thought was a decent phone at the time, they sold some other gear as a result.

kevinpet• 12 years ago

A halo product is something that isn't there to be the real flagship that's driving the revenue, but instead to be the ultra-cool item that people really lust after, associate that with the brand, then buy one of the lower end models.

For example, the Ford Shelby GT500 http://www.ford.com/cars/mustang/trim/shelbygt500/ is probably not even turning a profit for Ford, but when someone picks up an automotive magazine with an article about the car, it makes them more likely to buy the entry level Mustang at 40% of the cost, or any other Ford product.

aperrien• 12 years ago

About how many FLOPS is this thing? The specs portion of their webpage doesn't cover that, and I'm curious about using it for CUDA purposes.

skriticos22• 12 years ago

8 tera-flops

http://images.anandtech.com/doci/7894/GTC-2014-028_575px.jpg

wmf• 12 years ago

Pascal seems a lot more interesting: http://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/nvlink-pascal-stac...

(Although I am dreading having to type all those begins and ends.)

ThePhysicist• 12 years ago

That's pretty impressive. According to the announcement this card will sport 8 Teraflops (or about 112 GIPS), which corresponds to the entire available computing power on this planet in 1990. Let's play some Counterstrike :D

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/xbox-o...

sillysaurus32• 12 years ago

New benchmarking scheme: "Entire available computing power on the planet in year XXXX"

Awesome.

Jtsummers• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_supercomputing#Histo...

Another fun one. At 8 Teraflops it makes it equivalent to the top supercomputer of 2000. So our desktops (in terms of raw computing capability) are only about 14 years behind supercomputers, and that gap is closing rapidly.

mentos• 12 years ago

I definitely see a need for graphics cards like these with virtual reality around the corner.

I haven't bought a new graphics card in 5 years because even next gen games play well enough. But I can see VR changing that with the need to render the same scene twice (one for each eye).

I wonder how much money you'd have to drop today to have a rig that can push 4K to each eye? There isn't a headset that can support that yet but I'd imagine its atleast in the next 5-10 years.

selectodude• 12 years ago

It looks like two GeForce Titan Blacks in SLI can do one 4K screen. So if you did two monitors each with its own SLI, it would work for about $4000 in GPUs as of right now.

trhway2• 12 years ago

TITAN Z is engineered for next-generation 5K and multi-monitor gaming

5K? "all the way to 11" or somebody just didn't proof-read the copy?

dpe82• 12 years ago

Pro video cameras record beyond 5K - eg. RED Dragon does 6K. Shortly (probably at NAB this year) we'll be seeing theater projectors and studio monitors at that resolution.

krsunny• 12 years ago

I wonder how much bit coin you could mine with a whole rack of these.

TrainedMonkey3• 12 years ago

Not a whole lot. Nvidia cards are not as efficient at mining compared to AMD ones.

1. Single gtx titan gets 300 mh/s [0].

2. There are two gtx titan chips in this card, so let's say 600 mh/s.

3. A rack should fit around 60 of these. This gives us 36 gh/s (gigahashes a second).

4. According to this[1] calculator you will get a whooping 0.00361597 BTC per day, which would be worth around $2.12. Tomorrow expected payout drops to $2.09. Electricity should cost you at least an order of magnitude more.

[0] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-titan-perfor...

[1] http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator

Nvidia releases $3000 Titan Z

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