$3000 GeForce GTX TITAN Z Tested, Less Performance Than $1500 R9 295X2

Vigile writes: NVIDIA announced its latest dual-GPU flagship card, the GeForce GTX Titan Z, at the GPU Technology Conference in late March with a staggering price point of $2999. Since that time, AMD announced and released the Radeon R9 295X2, its own dual-GPU card with a price tag of $1499. PC Perspective finally put the GTX Titan Z to the test and found that from a PC gamer's view, the card is way overpriced for the performance it offers. At both 2560x1440 and 3840x2160 (4K), the R9 295X2 offered higher and more consistent frame rates, sometimes by as much as 30%. The AMD card also only takes up two slots (though it does have a water cooling radiator to worry about) while the NVIDIA GTX Titan Z is a three-slot design. The Titan Z is quieter and uses much less power, but gamers considering a $1500 or $3000 graphics card selection are likely not overly concerned with power efficiency.

So glad it's over

[TWX]

I'm so glad that I got the gaming bug out of my system when a ridiculously-priced video card was $300, and mainstream cards were in the $90-160 range...

This is ridiculous.

$3,000??

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm lost. why do people need a $3,000 video card to play games like World of Warcraft? I can play it fine on a $50 video card that takes one slot and a 15 inch monitor. Framerate is so fast that I had to turn on V-sync. I must be missing something.

64Bit floating point and compute mode

[Bleek II]

The titian line in not a purely gaming GPU! The higher price comes for leveraging it's GPGPU CUDA technology. It's like buying a server hardware and complaining it doesn't run your games and well as an i7 which costs less. Game enthusiasts always ruin hardware news with their one golden spec, the frames per second! "That said it’s clear from NVIDIA’s presentations and discussions with the company that they intend it to be a compute product first and foremost (a fate similar to GTX Titan Black), in which case this is going to be the single most powerful CUDA card NVIDIA has ever released. NVIDIA’s Kepler compute products have been received very well by buyers so far, including the previous Titan cards, so there’s ample evidence that this will continue with GTX Titan Z. At the end of the day the roughly 2.66 TFLOPS of double precision performance on a single card (more than some low-end supercomputers, we hear) is going to be a big deal, especially for users invested in NVIDIA’s CUDA ecosystem." - AnandTech

People don't buy very high end video cards ...

[perpenso]

People don't buy the highest performing video cards for gaming, they buy them mining virtual currency.

Keep that in mind when you see that great price for a used high end card. The card probably ran for an extended period of time over clocked to just under its "melting point" and just got replaced by an ASIC miner.