Nvidia recently announced the latest installment in the Titan series known as the ”Nvidia Titan V”. This beast is the most powerful GPU ever created by the company and is emphasized on high-compute performance. It is driven by the world’s most advanced architecture which is designed for machine learning and AI applications.
The Titan V is completely different from its predecessors, the company clearly states that the card is not targeted at gamers that is why it does not have the ‘Geforce GTX’ in the name. This card has started a new era in the Titan family as Nvidia has introduced their Volta architecture and some other significant changes have been made to increase the GPU’s computing abilities, especially the new tensor core.
Those who are thinking about gaming on this beast must know that this graphics card has a whopping price tag of $3000 and is focused for the workstation-class. But for those lucky ones out there who have three grand making a hole in their wallet and want to build the most powerful gaming rig then Titan V is the best choice.
Although this GPU is not designed for gaming also the drivers for this card are barely optimized for just about anything as the card is only a few weeks old and is driven by a new architecture. The gaming performance is still the best, you will get like 13% to 27% increase in performance depending on the game compared to Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti.
This is the fastest gaming GPU till date. The TimeSpy score by thurrott.com is the easiest way to see the performance gains and it’s quite noticeable with a score crossing the 10,000 point mark. For reference, the machine used to test these cards is an i7-6700k, 16GB of RAM with Samsung 840 EVO SSD that is running on top of an MSI Z170A KRAIT GAMING motherboard. All cards used in these benchmarks tests are kept at their factory clock with the latest available drivers.
However, this is early benchmark results and surely there will be a modest increase in performance once the company releases driver updates and fine tunes the hardware settings. Once these updates roll out we will test out even more benchmarks including the deep machine learning stuff.
Now let’s talk about what this monster is packing underneath the hood. It has 5120 CUDA Cores, 640 Tensor Cores, 1200MHz core clock and a 1455 MHz boost clock. When you add in that it has 12GB of HBM2 VRAM and can hit FP32 performance of 13.8TFLOPS, this card nails it in the performance department. Keep in mind the TDP is 250w running across 21.1 billion transistors.
The Titan family has already been making their way down into the computing performance and now the company has installed the compute-centric GV100 into the card to get the best ever performance. The new tensor cores and the Volta architecture provide users a cheap workstation class alternative for the smaller scale computing projects. The Titan family may have started as a card for consumers, but the latest Titan V is more professional than any card before.
The Titan V has a 250 watt TDP and requires an 8-pin and 6-pin power connector to operate. You get 3x Display Port and 1x HDMI port for external output connections. Design wise the Titan V is petty similar to the Titan Xp or the Geforce GTX 1080 Ti, however, there is a new blower-style cooler with the angular shroud design that uses all copper fins instead of aluminum. The card has a Gold Color ID which personally I don’t like.
Overall the Titan V is the most powerful graphics card that you can get your hands on, although you should not buy it for gaming as it does not provide good price to performance ratio. The performance gains are not massive enough compared to the 1080 Ti while the price is nearly 300% more. On other hand, for computing projects this card is the real deal if you want to get the highest performance possible from a single GPU. Also if machine learning is your thing then Titan V is the absolute choice.