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NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN Uses 7.1 Billion Transistor GK110 GPU

Posted by timothy on from the one-transistor-earthling-please dept.

Vigile writes "NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX TITAN graphics card is being announced today and is utilizing the GK110 GPU first announced in May of 2012 for HPC and supercomputing markets. The GPU touts computing horsepower at 4.5 TFLOPS provided by the 2,688 single precision cores, 896 double precision cores, a 384-bit memory bus and 6GB of on-board memory doubling the included frame buffer that AMD's Radeon HD 7970 uses. With a make up of 7.1 billion transistors and a 551 mm^2 die size, GK110 is very close to the reticle limit for current lithography technology! The GTX TITAN introduces a new GPU Boost revision based on real-time temperature monitoring and support for monitor refresh rate overclocking that will entice gamers and with a $999 price tag, the card could be one of the best GPGPU options on the market." HotHardware says the card "will easily be the most powerful single-GPU powered graphics card available when it ships, with relatively quiet operation and lower power consumption than the previous generation GeForce GTX 690 dual-GPU card."

31 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. What's the point? by i+kan+reed · · Score: 2

    All games that have the budget for graphics these days are targeted at console limitations. I can't really see any reason to spend that much on a graphics card, except if you're a game developer yourself.

    1. Re:What's the point? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Really? Like right in the summary man: for the "HPC and supercomputing markets"

      Not so you can run Quake at 500,000 fps

    2. Re:What's the point? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      All games that have the budget for graphics these days are targeted at console limitations. I can't really see any reason to spend that much on a graphics card, except if you're a game developer yourself.

      Buying the absolute-top-of-range card(or CPU) almost never makes any sense, just because such parts are always 'soak-the-enthusiasts' collectors items; but GPUs are actually one area where (while optional; because console specs haven't budged in years) you actually can get better results by throwing more power at the problem on all but the shittiest ports:

      First, resolution: 'console' means 1920x1080, maximum, possibly less'. If you are in the market for a $250+ graphics card, you may also own a nicer monitor, or two or three running in whatever your vendor calls their 'unified' mode. A 2550x1440 is pretty affordable by the standards of enthusiast gear. That is substantially more pixels pushed.

      (Again, all but the shittiest ports) you usually also have the option to monkey with draw-distance, Anti-aliasing, and sometimes various other detail levels, particle effects, etc. Because consoles provide such a relatively low floor, even cheap PC graphics will meet minimum specs, and possibly even look good doing it; but if the game allows you to tweak things like that(even in an .ini file somewhere, just as long as it doesn't crash), you can throw serious additional power at the task of looking better.

      It is undeniable that there are some truly dire console ports out there, that seem hellbent on actively failing to make use of even basic things like 'a keyboard with more than a dozen buttons'; but graphics are probably the most flexible variable. It is quite unlikely(and would require considerable developer effort) for a game that can only handle X NPCs in the same cell as the player on the PS3 to be substantially modified for the PC release that has access to four times the RAM or enough CPU cores to handle the AI scripts or something. That would require having the gameplay guys essentially designing and testing parallel versions of substantial portions of the gameplay assets, and potentially even require re-balancing skill trees and things between platforms.

      In the realm of pure graphics, though, only the brittlest 3d engines freak out horribly at changing viewport resolutions or draw distances, so there can be a reward for considerably greater power(for some games, there's also the matter of mods: Skyrim, say, throws enough state around that the PS3 teeters on the brink of falling over at any moment. However, on a sufficiently punchy PC, the actual game engine doesn't start running into (more serious than usual) stability problems until you throw substantially more cluttered gameworld at it.

    3. Re:What's the point? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I have no need for this therefore nobody does.

      Why do people find this argument convincing? It's just dumb.

    4. Re:What's the point? by Sockatume · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The Next Big Thing is all-real-time lighting. Epic has been demoing a sparse voxel based technique that just eats GPU power.

      --
      No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
    5. Re:What's the point? by msauve · · Score: 3

      It's for bitcoin miners, obviously.

      --
      "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
    6. Re:What's the point? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2, Interesting

      First, resolution: 'console' means 1920x1080, maximum, possibly less'. If you are in the market for a $250+ graphics card, you may also own a nicer monitor, or two or three running in whatever your vendor calls their 'unified' mode. A 2550x1440 is pretty affordable by the standards of enthusiast gear. That is substantially more pixels pushed.

      And almost all those pixels go to waste. I'm still waiting for display units that would be able to track in which direction you're actually looking and give the appropriate hints to the graphics engine. You'd save a lot of computational power by not displaying the parts of scene falling into the peripheral vision area in full resolution. Or, alternatively, you could use that computational power to draw the parts you *are* looking at with greater amount of details.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    7. Re:What's the point? by Luckyo · · Score: 3, Informative

      That is simply not happening this decade. The jump in required computing power is ridiculous, while the current "fake lighting" is almost good enough. At the same time, you can't really utilize the current GPU types efficiently for real time lighting because that's simply not what they're optimized for.

    8. Re:What's the point? by marcello_dl · · Score: 2

      > how do you think they know where to frack for natural gas or dig sideways for the hard to reach oil?

      Rhabdomancy!

      *ducks*

      --
      ---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
    9. Re:What's the point? by Khyber · · Score: 2

      You might want to redo that number, considering several 'generations' are just fucking rebadges of prior-gen tech.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    10. Re:What's the point? by Joce640k · · Score: 2

      By the time 'real lighting' (whatever that is) becomes possible the current fake lighting will also be able to do far more than it does today. Bang-for-buck, the current techniques will always win because the cost of simulating 'real' is exponential.

      --
      No sig today...
  2. GK110 vs. 7970 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Hmm. $999 for 4.5 TF/s vs. $399 for 4.3 TF/s from AMD Radeon 7970. Hard to choose.

    1. Re:GK110 vs. 7970 by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Hmm. $999 (2013) for 4.5 TF/s vs. $15 million (1984) for 400 MF/s from Cray-XMP. Hard to believe.

    2. Re:GK110 vs. 7970 by CodeReign · · Score: 2

      Are you measuring acceleration of of calculations? TF already contains a time unit.

    3. Re:GK110 vs. 7970 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Maybe a tera-farad? One heck of a capacitor....

    4. Re:GK110 vs. 7970 by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Funny

      Hmm. $999 (2013) for 4.5 TF/s vs. $15 million (1984) for 400 MF/s from Cray-XMP. Hard to believe.

      This is why I've stopped buying hardware altogether and am simply saving up for a time machine... Importing technology from the future is, by far, the most economically sensible decision one can make.

    5. Re:GK110 vs. 7970 by bytestorm · · Score: 3, Informative

      I think this new board does ~1.3TF of double-precision (FP64), whereas the Radeon 7970 does about 947MF, which, while not double, is a significant increase (radeon 7970 src, titan src). They also state the theoretical FP32 performance is 3.79 TF for radeon 7970, which is lower than the number you gave. Maybe yours is OC, I didn't check that.

      tl;dr version, FP64 performance is 37% better on this board.

    6. Re:GK110 vs. 7970 by Shinobi · · Score: 2

      Nvidia: Easy to use, easy to program for, good I/O capability, good real-world performance, hence their popularity in the HPC world.

      AMD: Awesome on paper. However, crap programming interfaces, Short Bus Special design in terms of I/O, and unless something's changed during the last month, it's STILL completely fucking retarted in requiring Catalyst Control Center and X RUNNING on the machine to expose the OpenCL interface(yeah, that's a hit in the HPC world.....)

      I'm going with Nvidia or Intel, thank you very much.....

  3. Serious stuff by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    And here I was, thinking that TI-83 has pretty cool graphics.

  4. Add-on CPU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    Wow. 3x as many transistors as a Core i7 3960X? I guess the days are finally here when you buy your graphics card and then figure out what kind of system to add on to it, rather than the other way around.

    1. Re:Add-on CPU by JTsyo · · Score: 2

      GPU to CPU is not a 1 to 1 comparison.

    2. Re:Add-on CPU by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      I wonder what kind of yields Nvidia is getting... 3 times as many transistors as one of Intel's fancy parts, and on a slightly larger process(28 vs. 22nm) that's a serious slice of die right there.

      On the plus side, I image that defects in many areas of the chip would only hit one of the identical stream processors, which can then just be lasered out and discounted slightly, rather than something critical to the entire chip working. That probably helps.

  5. Most Powerful GPU by Westwood0720 · · Score: 2

    "will easily be the most powerful single-GPU powered graphics card available when it ships"

    Yep, for the first week or two. I'll stick with my 670 that runs BF3 at max settings with 50+ FPS. Graphics card like the Titan is as useless as Anne Frank's drumset for the typical gamer.

    1. Re:Most Powerful GPU by l3v1 · · Score: 2

      "for the typical gamer"

      "targeting towards HPC (high performance computing) and the GPGPU markets"

      Nuff said.

      --
      I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
  6. Hardware is waaay ahead of software... by dtjohnson · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Software (other than games) that can actually benefit from this type of hardware is scarce and expensive. This $1000 card will probably be in the $5 bargain box at the local computer recycle shop before there is any significant software in widespread use that could put it to good use.

  7. Question for the HPC/maths crowd by benjfowler · · Score: 2

    I thought that most HPC users needed double-precision maths.

    Why, then, would a card aimed at the HPC market have so many single-precision cores alongside the double-precision cores?

  8. Actually right now by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Informative

    Console rez means 1280x720, perhaps less. I know that in theory the PS3 can render at 1080, but in reality basically nothing does. All the games you see out these days are 1280x720, or sometimes even less. The consoles allow for internal resolutions of arbitrary amounts less and then upsample them, and a number of games do that.

    Frame rate is also an issue. Most console games are 30fps titles, meaning that's all they target (and sometimes they slow down below that). On a PC, of course, you can aim for 60fps (or more, if you like).

    When you combine those, you can want a lot of power. I just moved up to a 2560x1600 monitor, and my GTX 680 is now inadequate. Well ok, maybe that's not the right term, but it isn't overpowered anymore. For some games, like Rift and Skyrim, I can't crank everything up and still maintain a high framerate. I have to choose choppy display, less detail, or a lower rez. If I had the option, I'd rather not.

    1. Re:Actually right now by Khyber · · Score: 2

      "I know that in theory the PS3 can render at 1080, but in reality basically nothing does."

      Mortal Kombat, Disgaea 3, Valkyria Chronicles, DBZ Budokai Tenkaichi, all of these are 1080p true-resolution games.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  9. Hardly "close", certainly "big". by chrysrobyn · · Score: 2

    With a make up of 7.1 billion transistors and a 551 mm^2 die size, GK110 is very close to the reticle limit for current lithography technology!

    I believe there are two modern lithography lens manufacturers, one at 32mm x 25mm and the other at 31mm x 26mm, although I'm having trouble seeing publicly available information to confirm that. Either way, 800mm2 is the approximate upper bound of a die size, minus a bit for kerf, which can be very small. Power7 was a bit bigger. Tukwila was nearly 700mm2. Usually chips come in way under this limit and get tiled across the biggest reticle they can. A 6mm x 10mm chip might get tiled 3 across and 4 up, for example.

  10. Wow, 4 games by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Seriously man, this isn't a console-fan argument nor is that one you want to have in relation to PC hardware because you'll lose. The point is, most games these days are targeted at 1280x720, or lower, at 30fps. The problem is to target anything higher you trade something off. Want 60fps? Ok, less detail. Want 1080? Ok, less detail. There is just only so many pixels the hardware can push. Crank up the rez, you have to sacrifice things.

    Computers can do more than that, but need more hardware to do it. The target on my system is 2560x1600 @ 60fps, with no detail loss. My 680 can't handle that all the time, that's the point.

  11. Nope by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Let's have a look at some recent non-FPS games:

    Darksiders II: 1152x640
    Dishonoured : 1280x720
    Mass Effect 3: 1280x720
    Need For Speed: Most Wanted: 1280x704
    Soul Calibur V: 1280x720
    Sleeping Dogs: 1152x640
    X-Com Enemy Unknown: 1280x720

    That's just a selection of games released last year, that aren't FPS's that use 1280x720, or lower, on the PS3.

    Most PS3 games don't do 1920x1080. It doesn't have the fillrate, or the VRAM, to deal with that without some serious quality sacrifices so most developers choose less rez for more eye candy.

    Remember that the resolution it is outputting at isn't the same as rendering. You can upsample any output you like, hence how a DVD player can output a 1080p signal though the DVD is 720x480 anamorphic.