[Aquinus]

Originally Posted by HumanSmoke

You think that is why Nvidia have broken their own convention of castrating FP64 performance on GeForce cards by allowing full 1:3 rate double precision on a consumer GTX Titan ?

You make it sound like you can enable full power DP math on non-Titan GeForce chips. Let's get something perfectly clear. How many shaders and performance did this card have to dedicate to get that 1:3 DP math? You also gimp SP math when you enable full speed DP math. At least the 7970 just does compute well regardless if its DP or SP.

Originally Posted by HumanSmoke

It would seem rather obvious (at least to me) that Nvidia is casting a wider net than just Surround gaming. GK110 was developed primarily for compute, yet aside from disabling MPI and ECC memory, the Titan retains not only the full spec of the $3200-4500 Tesla (inc the 6GB memory component) but also allows for the option of a 35% clock increase if the users workload is FP32 based.

You know, ECC memory is pretty important when you're doing compute applications. If you start overclocking the GPU your results can't be guaranteed. ECC at least eliminates the concern for corrupted memory to a point. Most gamers won't ever need full DP math and as far as professionals who use the Tesla cards, I think they might be intested in spending the extra money knowing that they can have their compute scale using MPI and that memory is reliable (ECC).

Originally Posted by HumanSmoke

Strange math. You work on a different numbering system where you live?
@ 2560 by W1ZZ's charts the Titan shows an increase of 31.57% over the 7970GE and 42.86% increase over the GTX 680

I was considering all resolutions which isn't the best gauge. 30% at 100% price is still a bit steep. A 1:3 ratio of performance relative to price against the 680 isn't exactly great still.

Originally Posted by HumanSmoke

GK 110 wasn't developed as a gaming chip- the GK104 and Tahiti were.

You're going to have to prove that I think. Just because it was in Tesla chips first does not mean that it was designed for compute, but the truth of the matter is, we don't know why it came out late and I doubt it was because it wasn't ready. I'm willing to bet if the 7970 was vastly faster and they needed the GK110, they would have released it. They didn't feel that they had to so they waited. The timing was pretty bad though IMHO but I don't agree that the GK110 was developed strictly with compute in mind.

Originally Posted by HumanSmoke

The only real argument is price- which nobody is disputing, and is largely irrelevant since the pricing is 1. Deliberately set high to ensure Nvidia need not keep the consumer channel supplied with GPUs that would return better margins as Quadro and Tesla, and 2. Not to undermine the professional cards above it in the product stack.

You know, for people who actually invest in Tesla and use it's features would think that not having MPI would suck because now it's that much harder to get more than one of them to work together. If Titan is designed for compute, it's designed to do it on its own because anything to allow it to scale or be truly reliable for compute has been gimped. Also once again, most data centers won't be wanted a Titan to crunch, they will be wanting something that's more reliable and has the features they need.

With all of that said, GK110 is a GPU that does DP math well when you enable it. I wouldn't go so far to say that it was designed for compute. Telsa has the extra hardware to do that the right way.

Originally Posted by HumanSmoke

Whats the point of Nvidia pricing Titan at $499 ?

That is what everyone else is saying, not me. I've been saying $700-750 USD would have been the sweet spot. 500-550 USD is too low and 1000 USD is too high. 750 feels like an acceptable medium that would get more buyers.