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$3000 GeForce GTX TITAN Z Tested, Less Performance Than $1500 R9 295X2
Vigile writes: NVIDIA announced its latest dual-GPU flagship card, the GeForce GTX Titan Z, at the GPU Technology Conference in late March with a staggering price point of $2999. Since that time, AMD announced and released the Radeon R9 295X2, its own dual-GPU card with a price tag of $1499. PC Perspective finally put the GTX Titan Z to the test and found that from a PC gamer's view, the card is way overpriced for the performance it offers. At both 2560x1440 and 3840x2160 (4K), the R9 295X2 offered higher and more consistent frame rates, sometimes by as much as 30%. The AMD card also only takes up two slots (though it does have a water cooling radiator to worry about) while the NVIDIA GTX Titan Z is a three-slot design. The Titan Z is quieter and uses much less power, but gamers considering a $1500 or $3000 graphics card selection are likely not overly concerned with power efficiency.
I'm so glad that I got the gaming bug out of my system when a ridiculously-priced video card was $300, and mainstream cards were in the $90-160 range... This is ridiculous.
That's still pretty much the case; the difference today is that some people make, or try to make, their living off playing & broadcasting their gameplay. This means they need to be able to run the latest games at the highest specs, record and livestream all at the same time without missing a beat.
Um, no, if Nvidia didn't want that, they wouldn't give the Titans full double-precision performance in the first place. I'm thinking that aside from getting a few sales from overenthusiastic gamers, their main motivation for marketing this as a gaming card is so their compute customers don't stop buying Teslas.