NVIDIA's Most Preposterous Graphics Card Ever
While the next round of consoles wait in the wings, potentially setting the general game graphics bar higher even if, as rumour has it, their actual hardware lags behind top-end PCs, NVIDIA's just done a new thing to help sew up the PC's status as Top Pixel Dog. If there's to be similar from ATI we don't know much about it yet, other than it has the rather pretty codename "Sea Islands" and it's not due any time soon, but we'll shout once we know more.
GeForce GTX Titan is the hilarious name of NVIDIA's new flagship card, it has been ripped from the heart of an IRL supercomputer (sort of), and £827 is its terrifying pricetag.
While benchmarks aren't doing the rounds yet (hopefully Mr Laird will be able to tell us more soon), official word is it's the fastest single-GPU card available. It may be that multi-GPU cards like NVIDIA's own GTX 690, or SLI/Crossfire multi-card setups, have an edge, but they're also a pain in the bottom.
Not as much of a pain in the bottom as £827, of course. It's beyond out of reach to the vast majority of humanity, and no matter how much I might hunger for it, it is impossible that I would ever own it.
What you get for the best part of a grand is a card which originated in a bone fide super-computer, the Cray Titan. There, the card was known as the Tesla K20, carried a $3500 pricetag, and worked in tandem with 18,687 identical cards. Later this month, mere (but exceptionally wealthy) mortals can own one.
Not all graphics cards get their own soundtracks, you realise. It's like a wrestler.
Now reconfigured for desktop PCs, it bears 2688 CUDA cores, 75% up from what's in NVIDIA's previous flagship uni-card the GTX 680, and a GK110 GPU (as opposed to the 680's GK104). It has 6GB of memory. SIX GIGABYTES. Christ almighty. If you want teraflops, those are 4.5 single precision and 1.3 double precision. If you want a release date, it is February 25th.
February 26th is my birthday. Just sayin'.