When it comes to satisfying the needs of the PC master race, there’s no such thing as too much. That’s why Nvidia went and created the $US3,000 Titan V, which the company is calling the most powerful graphics card ever created. Then, Nvidia went and painted it gold, so you wouldn’t confuse it with any of those other pedestrian GPUs.
All kidding aside, playing games on the Titan V isn’t really what this thing is meant for. (Please, no Crysis jokes.) Announced at NIPS, the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Long Beach, the Titan V was, according to Nvidia, designed to help scientists and researchers push the boundaries of AI and machine learning.
The Titan V has impressive specs, even compared to its predecessor, the $US1,200 ($1,597) Titan Xp. The Titan V packs 12GB of second generation high bandwidth memory (the first time HBM2 has been available on a “consumer” GPU) into the gold chassis. The Titan Xp had 12GB of slower DDR5. That means the memory bandwidth of the Titan V is way higher. According to Nvidia, it has a memory bandwidth of 652.8 GB a second, about 20 per cent faster than the 547.7 GB a second Titan Xp.
The Titan V also has 5120 CUDA cores (versus 3840 in the Titan Xp), so it can process a lot more data in parallel. And when the Titan Xp launched in April, Nvidia claimed it had 12 billion transistors inside. The Titan V has nearly double that: 21 billion. So it can hit 110 teraflops, 9 times higher than the Titan Xp and 18 times higher than the fastest console, the Xbox One X. Meanwhile, Nvidia has also added what it calls Tensor Cores, which will be used to solve problems in AI applications built on Google’s Tensorflow machine learning platform. And to sweeten the deal on their $US3000 ($3,993) GPU, Titan V users will also get free access to a range of deep-learning and high performance computing software just by signing up for an Nvidia GPU Cloud account.
While clearly not intended to please traditional home gamers (the Titan 1080Ti is more than enough for most gamers), the Titan V’s new Volta architecture could pave the way for Nvidia’s next-gen GPUs, as the company says Volta is twice as power efficient as the current 10-series Pascal-based cards, while also providing a “dramatic” boost in performance. Compared to the $US1,200 Titan Xp, the Titan V should be around 30 per cent faster while drawing the same 250 watts of power.
But if you absolutely have to have the most beastly GPU in your rig, the Titan V is available today. Just don’t waste your money on two, because the Titan V doesn’t have any SLI connectors.