14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan graphics card was the best single-GPU adapter for a while, but now it loses to two others, one of which doesn't even belong to NVIDIA. The company wants to remedy this apparently.
To elaborate, GTX Titan currently bests all other boards only in double-precision floating point GPGPU performance, which doesn't matter to gamers at all really.
It would have mattered in, say, workstations and supercomputers, where mathematical calculations are handled by the GPU. As it is, Titan is made for gamers and overclockers.
So with the AMD Radeon R9 290X matching it at almost half the price ($550 / €550 versus $999 / €999) and NVIDIA's own GTX 780 Ti besting it but still cheaper ($700 / €700), something needs to be done.
According to VideoCardz, NVIDIA won't be doing the expected (or hoped for) thing and cut the price of the former flagship.
Instead, it will release a new version of the Titan, which could be called “Black Edition” because of its cooler shroud, colored black instead of silver.
No doubt, it will still be powered by the GK110 graphics processing unit, likely with a core-configuration identical to the GTX 780 Ti, but with slightly higher clock speeds and, once again, the highest double-precision floating-point performance on the market (dual-GPU board notwithstanding).
If nothing else, this will once again grant legitimacy to the price of $999 / €999. NVIDIA actually has a point when it says that, after a point, it doesn't really matter how expensive something is as long as it delivers on its performance promises.
On that note, back at IFA 2013, we attended a closed-door meeting with some representatives. It was about the Shield handheld console and Tegra Logan, but the topic of add-in graphics still came up.
Their words (though not a direct quote) were along the lines of “we know reviewers will say it's awesome but too expensive, but we expect that because those 1-2% who the card is aimed at will buy it anyway, because money is just no issue for them.”
