Nvidia's dual-GPU behemoth, the GeForce GTX 690, has been out in the wild for over a year now, but the equally freakishly expensive GTX Titan has outsold it in less than three months. Now either the GTX 690 sold a pifflingly small amount (quite possibly) or the GTX Titan has been better received than even Nvidia thought.
According to Nvidia, it's the latter.
I had a chat with Ben Berraondo, the senior PR manager for GeForce, about the GTX Titan earlier this week. “Even we were surprised just how popular the Titan was. And still is,” he said. “Titan sold a lot more than the GTX 690, for example. It's still selling very well.”
Realistically though it shouldn't have come as much of a surprise. The GTX 690 was really just a one trick pony, and not a particularly good trick at that. The dual-GPU card was made for one thing, and one thing only: high-end gaming.
And with the reticence of the PC gaming public to go down the somewhat unreliable SLI route, especially for a £900/$1,000 graphics card, even I could have told you they weren't going to sell a huge amount.
The fact the GTX Titan is essentially the same supercomputer part as the Tesla K20X means that it's not just a card for gamers, but for the budding pro-graphics guys too. Having the ability to use the double precision floating point format, at speeds of around 1.3 TFLOPS, makes it one hell of a compute card.
And for less than half the price of the full-fat Tesla K20X.
“We made Titan with no constraints to what we were doing, and priced accordingly as well,” explains Berraondo. And with a wider market to aim at the GTX Titan just keeps on rolling. “We're basically selling every one we can get our hands on.”
If the rumours of an upcoming Titan-light card are true we could see them selling even more GK110-based cards. And maybe this time to actual gamers too.
