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Comment by breischl | Hacker News Reader

I don't track gaming GPU requirements that much, but this strikes me as past high end. Is this even useful for gaming, or is it really aimed at doing crypto, cryptocurrency mining, simulations, etc?

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The thing to note about this card is that it's a dual-GPU card - two chips with some sort of intra-card PCIE bus between them. You could get equivalent gaming performance by buying two of the GTX 780 Ti for about $1500. That level of performance is roughly what you want if you want to game at 4k resolutions at 60 FPS, so there are gaming applications for this card, even if it falls into "insanely high-end". The niche for this sort of card is in mini-ITX and similarly small computers, where there isn't enough room for a pair of cards and the builder wants "throwing money away" levels of performance.

That said, the selling point of the Titan cards is that their GPUs don't have the same restrictions put on their general-purpose compute performance as the standard gamer cards. NVIDIA locks this performance on their geforce cards in order to protect their lucrative GPGPU business, so this is really more of an entry-level card for scientific computing and other applications.

Cryptocurrency mining would be an obvious application, but a quirk of NVIDIA and AMD's differing architectures means that AMD cards are vastly more powerful at the specific functions needed to mine cryptocoins.

While a few years ago this card would have been great at mining cryptocoins, nowadays no gpu is ever going to be worth it as ASICs are 2-3 orders of magnitude faster and more efficient.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

ASIC won't play skyrim @ 4k though... :)

Its mainly used for the DP floating point that isn't limited artificially. The titan supercomputer at ORNL uses an older version of these. So heavy compute.

4k gaming is actually extremely painful performance wise and that is assuming a single monitor.

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