NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Offers 2,304 Cores For $650 160
Vigile writes "When NVIDIA released the GTX Titan in February, it was the first consumer graphics card to use the GK110 GPU from NVIDIA that included 2,688 CUDA cores / shaders and an impressive 6GB of GDDR5 frame buffer. However, it also had a $1000 price tag that was the limiting specification for most gamers. With today's release of the GeForce GTX 780 they are hoping to utilize more of the GK110 silicon they are getting from TSMC while offering a lower cost version with performance within spitting range. The GTX 780 uses the same chip but disables a handful more compute units to bring the shader count down to 2,304 — still an impressive bump over the 1,536 of the GTX 680. The 384-bit memory bus remains though the frame buffer is cut in half to 3GB. Overall, the performance of the new card sits squarely between the GTX Titan ($1000) and AMD's Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition ($439), just like its price. The question is, are PC gamers willing to shell out $220+ dollars MORE than the HD 7970 for somewhere in the range of 15-25% more performance?" As you might guess, there's similarly spec-laden coverage at lots of other sites, including Tom's, ExtremeTech, and TechReport. HotHardware, too.
Re:Still? (Score:5, Informative)
Is anyone else getting real tired of companies purposely crippling their high end products in order to sell them for less money? It's like openly broadcasting that their cards cost way too much to begin with.
It's a question of tolerances. The chips that come out of the fab are not 100% perfect. The designs are amazingly complex, and they usually contain some defects in the manufacturing process. If they don't meet the high-end specs, maybe they can disable the broken cores, relabel it as a mid-range chip, and sell for less money. It allows the yield to be higher and it lowers the price for ALL of the products.
Re:Still slower than AMD (Score:4, Informative)
In GPU terms, yes. The shaders and cores are very different between AMD and NVIDIA (that's why AMD can have 1536 and compete with a HD 7970 with 2048 shaders).
Re:Still? (Score:4, Informative)
As long as Nvidia keeps crippling double-precision performance on their (non-Tesla) cards, I'll keep buying AMD.
One of the highlights of the GTX Titan was that the card did double-precision floating point at full speed, just like one of Nvidia's Tesla products. That's no longer the case here - the GTX 780 performs double-precision at 1/24 of normal rate, just like a standard desktop GPU.