Tuesday, March 25th 2014
NVIDIA Announces the GeForce GTX TITAN-Z
Here it is, folks, the fabled monster dual-GPU graphics card from NVIDIA, based on its GK110 silicon, the GeForce GTX TITAN-Z (sounds like "Titans"). The first reference-design graphics card to span across three expansion slots, the GTX TITAN-Z features a cooler design that's an upscale of the GTX 690, with a pair of meaty heat-pipe fed heatsinks being ventilated by a centrally-located fan. The card features a pair of GK110 chips, with all 2,880 CUDA cores enabled, on each. That works out to a total core count of 5,760!
That's not all, the two chips have 480 TMUs, and 96 ROPs between them; and each of the two is wired to 6 GB of memory, totaling a stunning 12 GB on the card. At this point it's not clear if the GPUs feature full-DPFP, but their SPFP totals 8 TFLOP/s. Display outputs on the card include two dual-link DVI, a DisplayPort, and an HDMI. According to its makers, the GTX TITAN-Z is the first graphics card that's truly ready for 5K resolution (5120 x 2700 pixels) on a single display head, for gaming. At US $2,999, the card costs thrice as much as a GTX TITAN Black, for twice its performance.
That's not all, the two chips have 480 TMUs, and 96 ROPs between them; and each of the two is wired to 6 GB of memory, totaling a stunning 12 GB on the card. At this point it's not clear if the GPUs feature full-DPFP, but their SPFP totals 8 TFLOP/s. Display outputs on the card include two dual-link DVI, a DisplayPort, and an HDMI. According to its makers, the GTX TITAN-Z is the first graphics card that's truly ready for 5K resolution (5120 x 2700 pixels) on a single display head, for gaming. At US $2,999, the card costs thrice as much as a GTX TITAN Black, for twice its performance.
122 Comments on NVIDIA Announces the GeForce GTX TITAN-Z
First he shows Pascal, which irrelevant for another 2-3 years, few moments later he shows this meh Titan-z GK110 gpu...
:D
Now if someone could show me how I can cram this into my iMac that would be great lol.
Before
Pimp'd out
Here some more Titan Zoolander
2x8-pin
3-Slot so very limited on SFF like ITX were there only 2 slot and depth can be an issue
Nvidia knows the tipping point they can recoup engineering, tooling, manufacturing costs to deliver such a card, and they have a good idea the number they can expect to sell. Even if that number of units mainly to enterprise purchasers, the PR frenzy it whips-up within "Gamers" just adds to the business plan for releasing it. It's a perfectly good plan, and it returns venue, actually better profit that selling "X" amount chips individually (at lower margins) as offerings that counteracts AMD Hawaii product. Nvidia gets to elevate the brand even higher, use up chips on extreme products offerings, and that actual adds "cred" to themselves as not directly vying with AMD.
We know 20Nm Maxwell is some time off, Nvidia needs to maintain GK110 production, but can’t hold margins selling a bunch in some price war especially the good full-compute parts. I think the dual chip board Nvidia realized it lends itself to more to low-end enterprise, as the package provide substantial punch in more non-traditional chassis arrangements. Two of them puts 4x compute without the need for risers on a more traditional (cost effective) motherboard, but honestly I don’t how/what is entailed in that today. So, they release this as it devours two full-chips, pays the overhead, return profit, all the while shoring up the legitimacy for the pricing on the GTX 780/780Ti. Best of keeps the gamers in side-bar discussing it. It’s a very shrewd move to extent they use 2x the product (GK110), in an exceptionally high margin offering.
It will find buyers mostly from enterprise/compute that hadn't justified the Tesla/Quarto pricing. I see it as product that 85% of even "bleeding edge gamers" won’t step-up to purchase… that fine. It's a card that folks can use as for experimentation, pushing huge resolutions and multiple monitor configurations, if some deep pocket gamer finds it worthwhile... all the more merry.
2. Depending on in-game settings and the title, 6GB will NOT be enough for 3x 4K... FFS BF4 at default Ultra uses almost 3GB at 2560x1440...
3. +1
4. +1
5. Prices do not always have to go up when sales are good... basic business principle there...*blows dust off degree* LOL!
6. Who knows...
7. I had no idea the (vaporware?) 2x r9 290x was scaling 2x consistently. Like all dual card setups, it depends on several factors to determine scaling... drivers, the title, resolution, in-game settings, etc.
The sale to compute users isn't entirely clear either: Titan Z may use 3/4 the room of Titan Black, but 2xTitan Black is 2/3 the cost, and probably faster, and far less costly to replace if one fails.
(Disclaimer: I have an original firmware-flashed Titan, which has been quite good.)
By all accounts, EVGA will sell the 6GB 780 inc Kingpin and GTX 780 Ti for around the same money as the current 3GB versions. A couple of 780Ti's for around half the money of a Titan Z, and I'm pretty sure which will overclock better.Not necessarily. Tyan sells a custom barebones especially for rendering (the first board below is actually by Trenton, the second a Supermicro), there is a reason why they are fully stocked with boards. If the 4U (in this case) can accommodate 10 GPUs (5 x Titan Z), why would they stick with 8 Titan/Titan Black ? You are potentially losing 20% of the possible performance per unit. It isn't really that much different from server CPU economics- initial cost may be somewhat less than needing extra hardware to achieve the same throughput - there's a reason that there are multi PCI-E slot boards available, and they generally revolve around putting as much processing power as possible into a single unit.
As far as I know you have to go to the Tesla range with NVidia (like the K10) and Firepro with AMD (like the S10000) to get dual GPU cards that will work with front to back airflow.