GTX Titan Z detailed in PAX East NVIDIA Presentation

NVIDIA had a presentation at PAX East 2014, they mostly spoke of their GameStream technology, ShadowPlay updates, and the NVIDIA Shield. However, they briefly mentioned the GTX Titan Z during the presentation. Here's a picture I took of the slide they had up while they mentioned that the release date was still TBA.

 

Great, where do I order? I'm in for three... I'm totally sold, totally worthwhile.

 

Did they remember to mention that it will be almost 200 MHz slower than Titan Black while costing 50% more than 2 x Titan Black? Meanwhile Radeon R9 295X2 is actually clocked higher than 290X (with additional thermal/OC headroom because of CLLC) and outperfoms Titan Z at half the price. Nvidia is either daft to think that they will sell many of these at $3000 or a price cut is coming before it even launches.

 

lol nVidia's just doing this for the e-peen. Nobody with an ounce of common sense would pick this over the 295X2. And if you need compute performance, then get a proper compute card (aka Tesla). I'm really not sure where the Titan-Z fits in honestly. If you wanna do 3x 4K gaming, 2x R295X2 would be the way to go.

 

I'm waiting for someone to OC this and get the explosive result like the GTX590s

 

This will probably be one of those cards that turns into a developers card about a year after it is released. It isn't worth the investment.

 

Double the price of 295x? Come on nvidia, that's not the way it's meant to be played.

 

But it's the way it's meant to be paid!

 

^Nice one! This card is sick, but not worth the money.

 

Its exactly the way it is meant to be played.

Nvidia does charge what the market is willing to pay. No matter if its cards that is for scientific/enterprise workloads or just gaming cards. Despite what some people here seem to think, Nvidia knows the market inside out, hence why they have been making steady profit recent years and why AMD have been bleeding money. Despite being cheaper than Nvidia.

That is something many people here and most forums don`t seem to get.

Would price reduction come? Maybe. Depends if GTX 790 is around the corner which is what is targeted toward gamers (neutered GPGPU performance) and which should combat 295x2. Even if that card will not be released, a lot of researchers and enterprise business run applications that is CUDA optimized. Their whole code runs better on CUDA. That will save them more money than buying a cheaper 295x2 running non-optimized software

GTX Titan Z is obviously not targeting gamers with that price tag. Some will eventually buy it since they do have the money, but it is mostly for those who need the GPGPU performance.
There is a reason why 780 Ti was replacing Titan. 1/24 FP32 instead of 1/3 FP32, which again means less power demanding cores to up the clock and even add more cores. GTX Titan Z consist of two GK110 with 1/3 FP32 aka good at computation. Not to mention twice the VRAM.

 

Not targeting gamers?

From Nvidia:
"Built around two Kepler GPUs and 12GB of dedicated frame buffer memory, TITAN Z is engineered for next-generation 5K and multi-monitor gaming."
Introducing the GeForce GTX TITAN Z | NVIDIA Blog

"GeForce GTX TITAN Z is a gaming monster, built to power the most extreme gaming rigs on the planet."
Ultimate Power. The new GeForce GTX TITAN Z | GeForce

Sounds like they're targeting gamers to me...

Nobody is saying that it's a bad business decision, but from a consumer's point of view, $3000 is pretty staggering price. Not to mention that you could just get 2 Titans for $1000 less.

 

If compute performance is what you're after, wouldn't you be better off with a Tesla K20? Costs less than the Titan-Z, and none of the deliberately crippled FP32 compute crap. Granted, you get more than twice the vRAM with Titan-Z, if that sort of thing matters.

And if you're into extreme gaming, there's no reason to get Titan-Z over R295X2. If you have an intense dislike for AMD, 2x Titan Black would still cost $1000 less. So I'm really not sure who the Titan-Z is aimed at.

 

You seem to miss a lot of points here.

Tesla K20 have 2496 cores. It cost $3100. Titan Z have 5760 cores. It cost $3000.
Tesla K20 have 1/3 FP32. Titan Z have 1/3 FP32. So its no crippled. You get to use the Tesla drivers and you get better support with Tesla cards. But with Titan Z we are looking at 8TFlops vs 3.95TFlops in compute performance. There is a reason why the original Titan sold so well. Not just gamers used it.
GTX Titan Z does not have twice the VRAM of a Tesla K20. It have 1GB more. Its still 6GB VRAM per GK110 chip, while Tesla K20 have 5GB.

Titan Z would be ideal for business or projects thats looking to stack more power in less space. That is also the reason why some gamers will buy it. Less heat, less space, less noise.

Just like Titan its targeted for both gaming and professional users. Titan Z is a jack of all trades. Marketing will go both ways.
At $3000 I`m sure you get more of the latter group buying it.

The same can be said about R9 290x and R9 295X2. Although the difference is not so massive there as with Nvidia, you can still get 2 * R9 290X for $1100 instead of dishing out $1500 for R9 295X2.
Its all about priority and what you are looking for. Of course both companies try to make extra money on those who want a quieter, cooler and less space demanding solution.

 

For about the same price, couldn't you get a quad (4) 780Ti SLI setup? Scaling is an issue beyond 3-way SLI, but from a gamers perspective, wouldn't this still be a better choice, even 3-way SLI over the Titan Z?

 

Well yeah, if you have the room in your rig and don`t mind the increased temperatures and noise, 3xTitan would be better than 1xTitan Z for gamers.
But is it worth it? Take GTX 690 and GTX 680 for example. 3xGTX 680 only beat GTX 690 by around 20% due to poor SLI scaling.

 

My bad, I stand corrected. Although to be fair it is possible to get a K20 for under $3000 (or did you mean original release price?), and I did say Titan-Z had more than twice the amount of vRAM ie 12GB vs 5GB. Seems like the key missing features are ECC vRAM and MPI functionality in HyperQ. If ECC vRAM doesn't matter, then indeed the Titan-Z would be a pretty sweet compute card.

But I still don't understand why any informed gamer would buy a Titan-Z over any other existing options. If you want best bang for buck, there's the 295X2. If you want nVidia, 3 x 780 Ti Superclocked or 2x 690 (or 790 if they eventually decide to release it), would offer much more performance than the Titan-Z and cost $1000 less. I mean, I just can't see anyone rushing out to buy a Tian-Z for gaming, UNLESS you need 6GB of vRAM.

Actually come to think of it, if you're into 4K gaming, that 6GB vRAM will come in handy. So indeed as the slide points out, this card was designed for 4K gaming, as none of the other cards have nearly enough vRAM and will start choking at 4K compared to Titan-Z.

For 1080p though, Titan-Z is a massive waste of money, but of course that's probably not the intended market segment.