Thursday, January 31st 2013
First NVIDIA GeForce Titan 780 Performance Numbers Revealed
The rumor mill is spinning to galeforce (or should we say GeForce) winds. Its newest sack of flour points at what could be the first performance figure of NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce Titan 780 flagship single-GPU graphics card. Circulating among various Chinese tech publications is this 3DMark 11 Xtreme Preset screenshot from the PCinLife community, in which a lucky bloke claimed access to a GeForce Titan 780 engineering sample, and a driver to get it to work. In the scribbled out 3DMark 11 Xtreme Preset score screenshot (below), the source claims the fabled graphics card can singlehandedly score X7107 points. For reference, a GeForce GTX 690 usually scores in the region of X6000 points, and a GTX 680 around X3300. If true, NVIDIA has something truly remarkable up its sleeves, maybe the second coming of 8800 GTX. From older reports, we know that the GeForce Titan is expected to ship sooner than most people think, some time in February.
Source:
PCOnline.com.cn
112 Comments on First NVIDIA GeForce Titan 780 Performance Numbers Revealed
I can see the GTX branding on the screenshot. And to add insult to injury, this moronic Chinese site called it a GTX 780 Ti. Class A bullshit right there. Even if the Titan had all 2880 cores/15 SMX units enabled, it cannot possibly beat a GTX 690 on paper (or carry a mid-range series name). The only way it could even come close would have to be at some ridiculously VRAM-intensive resolution, like 3840x2160 or higher and even then it would be a struggle. Don't believe a word of this shit.
Oh and it won't have 6GB of VRAM. Not a chance in hell of that happening. If we take a look at Nvidia's timeline (reference designs only, 3rd party non-reference designs with extra VRAM are NOT included in this comparison)
7000 to 8000 series (512MB to 768MB) = 50% more VRAM
8000 to 200 series (768MB to 1024MB) = 33% more VRAM
200 to 400 series (1024MB to 1536MB) = 50% more VRAM
400 to 600 series (1536MB to 2048MB) = 33% more VRAM
as you can see, they follow the same pattern. Since the 700 series is essentially a resale of the same architecture, the best you can expect is 3GB of VRAM. Since this is their king of the hill halo card just like their GTX 690, you will not see 3rd party re-designs with double the VRAM since Nvidia will not allow it. Oh and since Nvidia's partners will still have loads of GTX 690s to get rid of, and the Titan will be priced under the 690, therefore the Titan will never beat the GTX 690, at least not in gaming.
This whole story reeks of horse shit. 85% of performance of a GTX 690 sounds about right, and that's the best anyone should expect.
Same with the 79xx series cards in a way. Although all we have is speculation as to why nVidia chose to release GK104 as their top end chip rather than GK100.
Take a look at what they did for GF100. nVidia waited a LONG time to release their GF100 because they had yield issues and needed something that would match the 5870.
EDIT: Additionally, nVidia typically releases their top tier first then back fills the line up. So it's entirely possible GK100 was ready to go, and they decided to wait until GK104 was ready and released that to compete with the 7970.