Nvidia Working On GTX Titan Ultra and GTX Titan LE

In the next few days to a week AMD will be launching the HD 7990 graphics card, this represents to first challenge to Nvidia’s superiority in the ultra high performance consumer graphics market segment. No longer will Nvidia’s GTX Titan and GTX 690 be the only options at $999 price point. AMD’s pricing will be crucial here because as of late Nvidia has not been forced to change its pricing because of what is an essential monopoly. Were AMD to hit back with a low priced HD 7990, say $849, then Nvidia would be forced to lower the prices of both their GTX 690 and GTX Titan to match. However, price lowering isn’t Nvidia’s only strategy as fresh reports suggest they are working on two new variants of the GTX Titan graphics card.

Nvidia could be launching two new graphics cards from the GK110 GPU design. The GTX Titan Ultra and GTX Titan LE, which we have already heard about before. The GTX Titan LE is a slightly scaled down version of the original GTX Titan with only 13 out of 15 SMX units enabled giving 2496 CUDA Cores, 208 TMUs, 40 ROPs, a 320 bit GDDR5 interface and 5GB of GDDR5. The GTX Titan Ultra on the other hand is a minor improvement over the GTX Titan original. The original GTX Titan uses just 14 out of the 15 SMX units on the GK110 chip, so the GTX Titan Ultra would use 15 out of 15 SMX units giving it 2880 CUDA cores and 240 TMUs.

The pricing of both these new cards are still unknown. You’d hope that Nvidia choose to put the GTX Titan Ultra where the current GTX Titan is and then knock the price of everything else down. Though, how generous Nvidia are with the pricing will all depend on how threatened they feel by AMD’s HD 7990 when it comes to market. Given Nvidia’s history of high pricing it seems likely that the GTX Titan Ultra will come in at $1100, with the GTX Titan remaining at $1000 and the GTX Titan LE coming in at $700.

What are your thoughts on the new Titan based graphics cards? What do you think pricing will be like?

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