Nvidia has rolled out its outrageous new GeForce Titan graphics card. And I don't know whether to laugh or cry.On the one hand it's the PC graphics card I've been begging for ever since Nvidia first revealed its mighty GK110 chip way back in may 2012.On the other, it's so expensive, it's hard to view it as a serious product for consumers.The end of graphics as we know itBut most importantly of all, it confirms what was already looking highly probable. The PC graphics refresh cycle as we know it is over.As you'll know from coverage elsewhere on TechRadar, Titan takes the GK110 chip and its seven billion transistors and sticks it into a consumer graphics board.That transistor count makes it twice as complex as Nvidia's GeForce GTX 680, previously the fastest single GPU the company made.But Titan isn't twice as fast at playing games because GK110 has always had a primary purpose of industrial number crunching. It's a chip designed for super computers.So some of the extra 3.5 billion transistors in GK110 compared with a GTX 680 are spent on things that don't make games run better or 3D graphics render faster. The upshot is 2,688 shaders and thus significantly less than double the 1,536 shaders of a 680.50 per cent fasterTitan is also a little lower clocked than a 680. All of which means an overall performance boost of around 50 per cent over the 680.That still makes it comfortably the fastest single GPU you can buy and an incredible achievement. But the victory feels a little emp
Comment