Titanic Pixels.
admin | April 11th, 2013 - 2:34 amPerhaps the Titan’s two most note worthy enhancements lie in the one category where Nvidia could be said to have short changed its loyal fans last time around. Memory. When the 680 emerged after AMDs 7970 with just 2gb of RAM compared to its rival’s 3gb, many were concerned that this was a meagre provision in the face of rising gaming resolutions and more frequent adoption of multi-screen setups. In practice, objective critics would agree that the combination of less RAM and only a 256bit bus on which to drive it did indeed tarnish performance enough to give AMD users precious bragging rights.
The Titan makes up for lost ground with authority by bringing no less than 6gb of RAM to the table and marrying it up with the 384bit bus found on both the HD 7970 and Nvidia’s own two year old GTX 580. In terms of sheer quantity, this is 1 and 1/3 times the total memory found on a GTX 690 and equal to that on AMD’s monstrous 7990, both of which have to share their quotas between two GPUs. 6GB dedicated to one GPU? Is that the sweet smell of eye candy?!
The Titan has one more trick up its sleeve, see those little yellow squares? Those are “double precision units”, 64 of them packed into each SMX compared to the 680’s 8. By default, these run at a lower clock speed than the single precision cores, 1/8th to be exact and in the case of the 680, their presence was all but redundant. The Titan however, features an additional option in the driver control panel to enable these DP cores to operate at their full speed, though with the penalty of a reduction in GPU frequency. Superfluous to gamers perhaps, but a worthy inclusion for developers, researchers, and Cuda rendering enthusiasts, and even more significant when one considers this cards’ spiritual ancestors. For In November 2012, the very same Gk110 chip lay at the heart of the Nvidia’s $3000 Tesla K20 and K20X, cards aimed squarely at the professional market.
Thus, is the GTX titan merely a cynical attempt to rebrand ageing technology whilst seduce enthusiasts into believing they have a chance to own something more exclusive than ever? Or is £830 really a damn good deal.
Here’s what the experts thought.
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