NVIDIA have announced their latest, high end graphics card. It is the fastest card that they have ever built. The GTX Titan costs a fancy figure at $999. As AMD have said that they are keeping with their HD 7000 range of graphics card for 2013, it is probable that this is the only super charged graphics card that is going to be released on the market this year. But how decent is the graphics card and is it worth that extremely high asking price?
The chip is around 520 mm squared and has over 7 billion transistors working away on the inside. These encase graphics architecture of 2688 single precision and 896 double precision CUDA cores. They are arrayed over 14 streaming microprocessors and set in 5 graphics processing clusters. Th card itself is surrounded in casing of magnesium and aluminium. Depending on the card model, there is 2 GB to 4 GB of RAM at play.
The cards have a typical boost clock of 876 MHz and the card will automatically adjust its curves to suit how you want it to run – whether you want it to consume less power, run cooler or be quieter.
PCMag tested the card out on a variety of modern computer games. They found that the Titan is much faster than NVIDIA’s previous single GPU offering, the GTX 680. The GTX Titan clocks an impressive 111 frames per second in Civilization V (compared to the 680’s 77 fps) and does the same in Batman: Arkham City (with the 680 performing at 84fps).
NVIDIA aimed to produce the smoothest game experience possible with their new Titan card and the benchmark figures show that they have achieved that goal. The card consumes 74 Watts when idled, a decent figure when it comes to power consumption. Load power was also decent at a maximum of 320 Watts.
PCMag found that the GTX Titan’s price/performance ratio is not as good as the GTX 680’s. The performance is improved by 35% to 50%, but this comes at twice the price tag. If you were looking at getting the best performance for your buck then the GTX 680 would still be your best bit.
However, this doesn’t mean that the GTX Titan is to be sniffed at. The card is packed full of power at the 6 GB of VRAM ensures that the card is going to be future proof for a long while. Also, those who want to use the card’s 1.48 TFLOPs of double precision floating point are getting a great deal for your money here when compared to other high end cards.
NVIDIA are aiming this card at the “ultra enthusiast”. It makes sense. This card will run any game you want at a high resolution with maxed out graphics settings. TechRadar note that the card runs quietly and is a beautifully engineered product. They do underline, however, that this is very much a graphics card for a premium computer system. If you are running intensive games and programs then this might be the card for you. It is the fastest single GPU card available right now and the price tag reflects that.