Nvidia Planning a Second GK110 Graphics Card for the Summer

Nvidia’s GK110 based GTX Titan graphics card is clearly the fastest single GPU consumer graphics card available on the market as of today. The GTX Titan boasts about 25% more performance than the GTX 680, yet costs more than twice the price at $950-1000 compared to the GTX 680’s $450-500 price. This means that when it comes to getting value for money many people are going to completely ignore the GTX Titan in favour of a pair of much cheaper and better performing single GPU cards in SLI, such as two GTX 670s or GTX 680s. Consequently, Nvidia knows that the GTX Titan has a very small market and will probably sell very few units. Yet, Nvidia still wants to push the GK110 based graphics cards into the market before it makes the shift the next series Maxwell based GPUs.

So how is Nvidia going to shift more GK110 GPUs without lowering the price of the GTX Titan? Well it is going to create a new graphics card based on the GK110 GPU. This new graphics card will feature 13 out of 15 SMX units enabled, compared to the 14 out of 15 that the GTX Titan currently has. The specifications are rumoured to be the following:

• GK110 Silicon
• 2496 CUDA Cores
• 13 SMX Units
• 208 TMUs
• 40 ROPs
• 320 bit GDDR5 interface
• 5GB GDDR5

So on the face of things this new GPU looks like it will only lose about 5-10% performance over its bigger sibling, the GTX Titan. We don’t yet know what it will be named but we assume it will probably be similar to the GTX Titan in that it won’t have a numerical value for its name. On the other hand, the GTX 685 or GTX 680Ti monikers are equally plausible options, a GTX 695 seems unlikely given this card will perform, and be priced lower than a GTX 690.

The expected price for this new graphics card is also unknown but given the huge gap between the $450 GTX 680 and $1000 GTX Titan, a price of $650-750 seems like a sensible estimation to fill that void. Availability estimates suggest we could see this new graphics card in July or August of this year (2013).

Do you think that releasing another GK110 card is a good idea? If you were put off by the price of the GTX Titan would you consider buying this instead? Let us know your thoughts.

Source