NVIDIA HAS RELEASEDits Geforce GTX Titan Z graphics card, which claims to be "the most powerful graphics card ever", for a tidy sum of $3,000, or about £1,800.
Nvidia's most powerful card initially was expected sometime in April, but after a month delay it is now available from online stores such as Amazon and NCIX and Tigerdirect. However it's worth noting that this is only in the US and the UK has yet to have a sniff.
The Titan Z debuted at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in March, when the firm's co-founder and CEO Jen Hsun Huang announced that the graphics card is built around two Kepler GPUs and 12GB of dedicated frame buffer memory, engineered for next generation 4K displays and multi-monitor gaming.
The Geforce GTX Titan Z GPU has 5,760 cores, 12GB of memory and eight TFLOPS performance. Unlike traditional dual-GPU cards, its twin GPUs are tuned to run at the same clock speed with dynamic power balancing, so neither GPU creates a performance bottleneck.
"If you're in desperate need of a supercomputer, and you need one really close by and handy and you want it to sit next to your desk, we have just the card for you, Titan Z," said Huang at the launch event in March.
"It takes every single video game you have, and allows you to drive it at the highest resolution, with all the features turned on, at 4K resolution on multiple displays and enjoy it at the maximum frame rate."
Huang explained that researchers, designers and artists will use the Geforce GTX Titan Z for CUDA research, machine learning, developing software and video editing, because "it is a supercomputer you can buy on retail".
"If you put it in perspective, [it's] all for $3,000, about 50 cents per processor," Huang added. "If you compare it to the server that ran the Google Brain, this processor can now fit the entire Google Brain servers in just three GPUs: 17,280 cores, [and at] just 200 Watts, [costing] $12,000 and several hundreds times more energy efficient."
During the unveiling, Huang also showed off some gameplay powered by its next generation Geforce GTX Titan Z graphics card running the Unreal Engine 4 gaming engine, which we have to admit looked jaw-droopingly realistic.
