New Nvidia GTX Titan Z Graphics Card Turbocharges GeForce GPU Performance

Nvidia just unveiled their new top-of-the-line GeForce card, which is aimed at high-end gamers and other users looking for a GeForce card with the best possible GPU performance in the least amount of space. The new GTX Titan Z card features two GK110 GPUs housed together on one card. The GK110 GPU is the same one found in the current top-of-the-line GeForce card, the GTX Titan Black, meaning the Nvidia GTX Titan Z offers nearly double the performance of the Titan Black, thanks to a staggering 5760 CUDA Cores (2,880 per GPU) and 12GB (6GB per GPU) of GDDR5 Memory over dual 384-Bit interfaces, all while occupying the same full-length, double-slot space as a single GTX Titan Black.

CEO Jen-Hsun Huang unveiled the GeForce GTX TITAN Z at the annual GPU Technology Conference.

With the quoted 8 teraFLOPS of graphical processing power, the GTX Titan Z enables unprecedented gaming performance in resolutions as high as 5K. In addition to high-end gaming rigs, the card will also undoubtedly find its way into workstation computers in need of CUDA, Direct Compute, or OpenCL GPU acceleration for GPU-aware applications such as Adobe Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve. It's important to remember that the gaming-oriented cards in the GeForce line typically have shorter lifespans than equivalent Quadro or Tesla models—they're not designed to be used eight hours per day, five days a week, as might be the case in a professional editing suite, and doing so would greatly reduce the life expectancy of the card. They do, however, offer far more performance for the money, and small businesses or freelancers on a budget who won’t be utilizing the cards full time might be better served by using a card like this. There are other differences between gaming and workstation GPUs, such as the use of ECC memory, which may or may not matter, depending on what application you are using.

The GTX Titan Z offers the same DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI-I, and DVI-D outputs as the GTX Titan Black, and while the official specs for the Titan Z have yet to be announced, it should support at least four displays, since the GTX Titan Black supports up to four. The exact clock speed of the GPUs, as well as the card’s power requirements, are also unknown at this point, but it’s safe to assume that the clockspeed will be a bit lower than the Titan Black card, while the power requirements will be a lot higher—though not as high as two Titan Black cards.

Speaking of two Titan Blacks, it's possible to emulate the performance of the new GTX Titan Z today by running two GTX Titan Black cards together in a dual GPU configuration using Nvidia SLI Technology. Two GTX Titan Black cards are more affordable than a single GTX Titan Z, but you will need a computer with space enough for two double height PCIe x16 cards, as well as power supply capable of supporting two 250W GPUs running in tandem. Also, this leaves little room for other PCIe cards in all but the largest computer towers.

For those looking for the most performance they can get from a single gaming-oriented graphics card, the Nvidia GTX Titan Z currently looks hard to beat.