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Nvidia teases the Titan X
Today, Nvidia announced that the Titan X is coming soon. It's a Maxwell-based GPU with 8 billion transistors and 12 GB of memory. Based on the specs, it's probably effectively 1.5 times a GeForce GTX 980 in basically all ways. Given the die size of the GTX 980 and Nvidia's historical willingness to build huge GPUs, it's not terribly surprising that such a card would be on the way. Indeed, it was already rumored, though it was an obvious enough guess that it would have been rumored even if it didn't exist.
What I'm interested in today, though, is why Nvidia felt the need to tease it. If AMD had the best GPU on the market, the justification would be obvious: saying don't buy an AMD card today because an Nvidia card coming soon will be better. Nvidia tried to hype Fermi for many months leading up to its launch in that exact situation, for example.
But that's not the situation today. The best GPU on the market is Nvidia's own GeForce GTX 980. There's even a case for big Kepler as the second best GPU on the market, though it seems to be discontinued in GeForce cards because it can't compete with Maxwell. Normally, when you've got the clear best card on the market and are charging a premium price for it, you want people to buy it today.
I've got two different and contradictory explanations. The first, and the one I'd regard as more likely, is that Nvidia knows that the GeForce GTX 980 won't be the best card on the market for long. Rather, AMD is going to release a better GPU and very soon. If AMD makes a big, discrete GPU with the improvements that they've talked about in Carrizo, there's plenty of die space and power headroom for AMD to make something faster than a GTX 980. Of course, there's plenty of die space and power headroom for Nvidia to make something faster, too: the Titan X.
But Nvidia wants to spoil AMD's launch. They don't want AMD's launch reviews to say, this is the best card out there and you should buy it. Rather, they want the reviews to say, yeah, it's better than a GTX 980, but it's not as good as the Titan X will be. Wait for that.
The other explanation is that Nvidia knows that AMD doesn't have anything new coming soon. If people are going to buy the top card, they want it to be spending $1000 for a Titan X, not $550 for a GTX 980. A GTX 980 is faster than a Radeon R9 290X, but not massively so, and at $550, it's already not trying to be a price/performance proposition. A Titan X could plausibly be nearly twice as fast as a Radeon R9 290X, putting it in a different stratosphere entirely. That's the sort of product where you can ignore the competition and charge what you want. But someone who buys a GTX 980 today probably isn't going to upgrade to a Titan X in a month.
What's definitely not going to happen, though, is for Nvidia to launch the Titan X for $550 and drop the GTX 980 to $350 in the absence of new AMD competition. If they were planning on doing that, they wouldn't have said anything today. They'd rather have sold more GTX 980s at $550 in the meantime.
Nvidia didn't announce a price on the Titan X. But I expect $1000. Remember the price on the original Titan?
The real question, though, is whether the Titan supercomputer from which the GeForce cards derive their name is going to upgrade to a bunch of Titan X cards.
Comments
Why the fuck do you need this monster cards , i play games perfectly with my 4 year old alienware laptop.
it's my first rig that never had issues except some hot tea spill on it but still working lol, keyboard died ...
Are you running triple high res monitors?
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
All propaganda and speculations and bad for PC market but seenms you guys don't care what happen to AMD sadly:(.
I don't buy in these payed articles promoting Nvidia.
I buy again AMD because for year i have 2x MSI 290x and very pleased with it payed a lot less then the over priced cards from the green camp.
AMD 390X is the card to buy this year not the crap Nvidia dumb on market most are way to over priced and peformance wise only for few fps more paying a few hundred dollars more little better score in benchmarks lol.
But you guys want AMD dead and Nvidia rule fine but dont come here whine about it, innovation will stop AMD dies and prices go up and PC market even more on the decline going down hill and all thanks to you Nvidia buyers.
BAH:(
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit
Your pet issue isn't my pet issue.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
I bought a Titan when they were new, the superclocked version. Not even 6 months later I had buyer's remorse >.>
That's what I get for trying to build myself something nice with PC hardware lol.
Granted, I won't need to replace that thing for years if I don't want to, which was the point, but better cards were out months after I got my Titan, lol.
I want one.
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
i do believe a Titan is a waste of money for gaming but to answer your question, if my PC doesnt run games at ultra settings in 1080p at 60fps then i need an upgrade. PC gaming is expensive and i wouldnt spend that much money if its not going to pay off (with high frames per second at the highest settings possible at high resolutions)
I believe Nvidia is launching another Titan to put a wrench in AMD's plans, because they plan to launch their HBM card sooner than Nvidia (Nvidia's Pascal isn't before 2016). Even if AMD managed to push out a monster power card, i wouldn't even touch it because of their power requirements and heat generated.
Ever since i switched to Nvidia after the 6000 / 7000 series, i've been running much cooler and more efficient gaming. I'm no loyalist by any means to a brand, but i will switch to whatever offers the best bang for buck AND balance.
Well, it's certainly not my second reason above:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-radeon-r9-oculus-rift,27298.html
"being powered by an unannounced Radeon R9 flagship ultra-enthusiast product. Those words, in their exactness, were told to me officially, as in on the record, by AMD."
So basically, AMD has something new coming, and presumably soon.
It's likely that AMD's next card will lead to the Radeon R9 290X and R9 290 being discontinued, not dropped in price. A high end card will have high end power consumption--and that includes the Titan X, too--but efficiency for AMD's next card is unknown. Nvidia has demonstrated that they can offer much better efficiency than 2012 era products with Maxwell. AMD hasn't demonstrated that yet, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they can't do it.
AMD has had an energy efficiency advantage for most of the last seven years. The Radeon HD 3870 didn't offer top end performance, but it used a whole lot less power than the contemporary Nvidia cards that did. By the time Nvidia got their lineup to 55 nm more than a year later, it was only enough to get parity in energy efficiency. And that only lasted a few months before the Radeon HD 4770 gave AMD a huge lead again for anyone who cared primarily about energy efficiency. That lead would last for three years until the launch of the GeForce GTX 670/680 made it roughly tied. You can argue that Kepler had a slight energy efficiency advantage since then, but it was slight, and certainly much closer than Fermi was to AMD's competitors.
Only with Maxwell has Nvidia opened up an energy efficiency advantage. The first Maxwell cards launched about a year ago, but were seriously overpriced in desktops, and only hit one narrow performance range. The launch of the GTX 980/970 changed that, of course, but that was only 5-6 months ago. And it's plausible that AMD could catch up or even take the lead in energy efficiency very soon.
It is, of course, plausible that they won't. If AMD's next generation is a Fermi-like debacle that needs 70% more power to offer 10% more performance than a GTX 980, then you could justify going Nvidia for the sake of efficiency. But AMD has talked about Carrizo being their biggest energy efficiency jump ever, and that includes the GPU. The improvements to the integrated graphics will presumably find their way into discrete cards.
As for HBM, that's supposed to save tens of watts. Instead of a relatively narrower memory bus width clocked higher as you have with GDDR5, HBM can have a much wider memory bus clocked much lower. That can save a ton of power. It's hardly guaranteed that the next AMD flagship will offer HBM, but if it does, there's a decent chance that will help AMD to an energy efficiency advantage over Maxwell--and over the Titan X.
im happy with my amd 290x
cost 80% less and run every game maxed and 4k
I love a good old fashioned GPU arms race. Arms race! Arms race! Arms race! Arms race! Arms race!
I want one too. Also, I can't wait to see what AMD does in response.
Same chip, bigger die, boring, and that tactic hasnt been doing all that well for NV.
As for power efficiency: AMD had a long time lead
Cooling systems have advanced from stone age, even Fermi can be cooled quietly and efficiently without going water.
I have yet to see someone talking about power efficiency actually crunch some numbers to see RL effect of that efficiency vs. the cost. They have framework cards need to operate within, and as long its within: who cares really.
I tend to think it's all just marketing, and in that vein, beyond just consumer graphics products.
These high end cards, while high margin, are definitely not high volume. That, and nVidia is trying desperately to move beyond just consumer graphics cards, which still makes up the vast majority of their revenue (although they lump in GRID/Quaddro and other HPC products in with their GPU revenue numbers on their quarterly reports).
Having "the fastest" is a big deal for nVidia, because they are trying very hard to brand themselves as a high performance brand - much like Cray was back in the 70/80's and Silicon Graphics in the 90's. If you are trying to compete in the HPC arena, and you don't have a reputation for being "Fastest" that's a big strike against you.
I'm sure AMD's impending 390x has some measure in there, and nVidia is certainly no stranger to doing paper launches a long ways out to just build hype and throw the fanboys a bit of red meat, but I think it has as much to do with overall corporate image as it does anything. I also would not be surprised at a 4-figure price tag either.
I remember cleary "people" were shouting who cares about amd energy efficiency, and normal working temperature, nvidia is fastest.
Whatever Nvidia was doing at a point in time in the last decade+ was the proper way, and everything else just AMD failing(what that actually was, had been changing so fast, a Nvidia card was "the best" because of something one month and then "the best" because of something completely opposite the other month. It's very funny
It's like people forgot Nvidia was in fail mode since after 8800GT up untill 500 series :P that's 5 generations in a row failing(Technically 3.5 generations, 300 was pure oem, and 100 something in between).
Did u notice the amd part at GDC explaining the benefit of their new LiquidVR, and how it's gonna enable than when you're running 2 GPUs, 1 can discretely and completely separately render the the left eye in the virtual headset, and the second render the right eye. 100% of the power from both for each eye.
Now that sounds awesome.
That will mean that, for most things, everything up to rasterization will have to be duplicated on both GPUs. If you're doing both eyes on a single GPU, you can do everything up through geometry shaders once, then have geometry shaders split it to give a copy to each eye. You can't do that if you're rendering different eyes on different GPUs.
It will probably still, on net, be better than traditional CrossFire/SLI. But like CrossFire and SLI, it's not going to be nearly as good as a single GPU that is twice as fast.
Its a sick-looking card no doubt, but one thing that makes me lol is the amount of anger from mainstream gamers leaving comments on news sites like "wtf 12gb vram who even needs that much for gaming" (key word: gaming) and "way to release a card that gamers can't afford Nvidia".
The truth is, as awesome as this will be for triple high res monitors and ultra-enthusiast gamers, this card really benefits the development studios more than anyone. A lot of people don't know just how much VRAM 3D modelling can burn through. Running 2 of these bad boys in SLI will be a god-send for the future of DX12 rendering, so development studios get to play with this and really bring life-like graphics to games while the rest of us wait for it to actually become affordable, at which point games will actually most likely use 6 - 8gb of VRAM just running on one monitor.
Teh future is here
If you want a 12 GB video card, you can buy it today:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133494
Or, for that matter, 16 GB:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814195129
Basically, Nvidia is trying to make the Titan X into a premium card for a premium price tag. One way they do that is to give it as much memory as they possibly can. And I mean that literally: a 384-bit GDDR5 memory bus can have at most 24 GDDR5 memory chips attached. The largest GDDR5 memory chips commercially available are 4 Gb = 512 MB. So you attach 24 of them to the card and get 12 GB.
AMD could launch a 16 GB version of the Radeon R9 290X almost immediately if they wanted to by basically doing the same thing. Indeed, the FirePro W9100 is basically that, though with some software and firmware differences.
And the extra memory doesn't even add ridiculous amounts to the cost of production. You know those 4 Gb GDDR5 memory chips? The PlayStation 4 uses 16 of them. I'm not sure what Nvidia pays for the memory chips, but my guess would be that the difference between 6 GB and 12 GB is in the ballpark of $50. That's a big problem in a card that you hope to sell for $200 at retail. Not so much if the price tag is $1000.
Now, the Titan X is kind of for a different market, one that straddles the line between entry-level HPC use and high end consumer use. But if AMD is competitive with their own high end card, they could easily force Nvidia to launch a successor to the GeForce GTX 780 Ti: basically the same as Titan for gaming use, but with some HPC stuff disabled and a lot cheaper. I said "cheaper", not "cheap"; in the case of the GTX 780 Ti, $650 was a lot cheaper than $1000, but still hardly cheap.
I agree with your post, the thing here is that for workstation GPUs, the Titan X is still going to be marginally better than the Quadro and FirePro line. For example, the 16gb FirePro you listed is $3,099. For the same price you could run two SLI'd Titans. Workstation enthusiasts will most likely be stuffing as many Titans as they can into their splitters, for much better performance and cheaper overall cost than the current Quadro / Tesla / FirePro lineup. I remember seeing, for example, the best Arion system was running seven Titans via PCIe splitter box.
It depends on what you're going to do with it. If you need the specialized drivers of professional graphics cards, then Titan will be a complete non-starter. Ditto if you need ECC memory.
Don't get me wrong, here: Nvidia will sell some Titan X cards for GPU compute purposes. But Quadro, Tesla, and FirePro cards all exist for a reason and still have a place in the world.
I kind of view things like the Titan X kind of like Lamborghinis or Ferraris. Its not really about price/performance, or supply/demand at that point. Its about recognizing that there are people out there who have the assets to afford something and want the absolute pinnacle of what technology allows for at that time, and are willing to pay for it.
Honestly i dont personally think this has anything at all to do with what AMD may or may not release in the near future, i think it has everything to do with going, "We're NVIDIA, we're the best at what we do, and here's the proof"
Ferrari doesn't need to create cars like the La Ferrari, the F40/F50/etc, their "regular" cars (like the gtx 980 for nvidia) are already spectacular pieces of kit. But sometimes its about seeing what you can do, pushing the envelope, etc.
Anyways, my two cents.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/amd-unofficially-confirms-radeon-flagship-%E2%80%93-r9-390x-launches-at-computex.html
Bye bye Titan X:P
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit
And all you'll need to power it is a small pebble bed thorium reactor.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche