Nvidia release "Supercomputer" graphics card

Nvidia Titan

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee is home to the worlds fastest supercomputer nicknamed "Titan", Nvidia created the chips that power Titan and have now released a graphics card using the same chip.

 The Nvidia GTX Titan is a high end graphics card for gamers, but would also be an excellent card for Media professionals. It goes on sale today at a recommended retail price of £827 (Check to verify the price in your local currency). At that price it's certainly not cheap, but the technical specifications are very impressive.

The GTX Titan is a single processor card, using the same processor as the 18,688 processors in the Titan supercomputer. It is based on a new architecture, GK110, which gives it 2688 CUDA cores and 7 more Streaming Multiprocessors than the GK104 used in the GTX 600 series cards.

The card has 6GB of RAM on board with a memory bandwidth of 288 GB/s (yes thats Gigabytes per second!!) but it only consumes 250W of power. It also runs quieter than the previous cards which is always good in an edit suite.

CUDA

Using the power of the CUDA cores with software that can take advantage of them will give excellent performance. Adobe CS6 uses CUDA for it's Mercury playback engine so this would be an excellent card for use in an Adobe system and Blackmagic's DaVinci Resolve would also make use of the power of this card. Lightworks makes extensive use of Pixel Shaders, which will also benefit from this card.

If one card is not powerful enough for you the GTX Titan can be installed in 2 or 3 way SLI, multiplying the performance even further.

This truly is a groundbreaking card and for the moment holds the crown of the worlds most powerful GPU.

Although the price may seem high for a consumer grade card it is a lot cheaper than most workstation class cards with performance that would run rings around most of them.