NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX TITAN is Back in Black

The past couple of months have been a little odd for the original GeForce GTX TITAN. With a price tag of $1,000, and the well-known fact that the $699 GTX 780 Ti released this past fall can match or beat it in most gaming benchmarks, it’s just been a hard sell. But of course, TITAN is about more than just simple gaming, and those who’ve been willing to dig beneath the surface to see what it is that makes TITAN special will have no doubt understood its price-premium a bit better.

Even so, at $1,000, it’s understandable to at least want the card to match the gaming performance of the card that costs $300 less. With the new TITAN Black, that’s being accomplished.

Like the GTX 780 Ti, TITAN Black comes equipped with 2,880 CUDA cores, although with a slight clock boost behind it (889MHz vs. 875MHz). We’d expect that single-precision performance would be similar, at just over 5 TFLOPs. On the double-precision side – the biggest reason TITAN is no ordinary GeForce card – the 960 CUDA cores are retained. The original TITAN had double-precision performance of over 1.3 TFLOPs, and given the clock increase between the two cards (889MHz vs. 837MHz), I’d assume we’d see a slight performance boost there as well.

Of course, a TITAN couldn’t be a TITAN without a mega framebuffer, so it should come as no surprise that NVIDIA has retained the 6GB of GDDR5. Performance there has been improved, however, jumping from 6,000 to 7,000MHz. TDP and everything else largely remains the same, although the TITAN logo has been colored black (which is quite appropriate, I’d say).

I doubt it’s needed, but here’s NVIDIA’s current line-up. The original TITAN is there for reference; I can’t imagine it’ll be in NVIDIA’s sights going forward (and it’s already extremely difficult to purchase at a reasonable price).

NVIDIA hasn’t given us word as to when TITAN Black will hit the market, but given the absolute dearth in availability of the original TITAN, I hope that day is not too far off.