So long to Computex 2013, we barely knew thee. You poured stories all over our news feed for more than a whole week. What say you, another story for the… metaphorical road… between here… and… Taipei? Okay, so the metaphorical road is bumpy and unpaved, work with me.
It was substantially more difficult to decipher the name of a video card a number of years ago. Back then, products would be classified by their model numbers and often assigned a suffix like: "Ultra", "Pro", or "LE". These suffixes actually meant a lot, performing noticeably better (or maybe worse) than the suffix-less number and possibly even overlapping with other number-classes.
Image Credit: zol.com.cn via Tom's Hardware
Just when they were gone long enough for us to miss them, the suffixes might make some measure of a return. On the show floor, Colorful exhibited the NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan Ultra Edition. This card uses a standard slightly-disabled GK110-based GeForce GTX Titan GPU, with the usual 2688 CUDA cores, and 6GB of GDDR5. While the GK110 chip has potential for 2880 CUDA cores, NVIDIA has not released any product (not even Tesla or Quadro) with more than 2688 CUDA cores enabled. Colorful's Titan Ultra and the reference Titan are electrically identical; this "Ultra" version just adds a water block for a cooling system and defaults to some amount of a factory overclock.
But, this is not the first time we have heard of a Titan Ultra…
Back in April, ExtremeTech found a leak for two official products: the GTX Titan LE and the GTX Titan Ultra. While the LE would be slightly stripped down compared to the full GTX Titan, the GTX Titan Ultra would be NVIDIA's first release of a GK110 part without any CUDA cores disabled.
So if that rumor ends up being true, you could choose between Colorful's GTX Titan Ultra with its partially disabled GK110 based on the full GTX Titan design; or, you could choose the reference GTX Titan Ultra based on a full GK110 GPU unlike the partially disabled GK110 on the full GTX Titan.
If you are feeling nostalgic… that might actually be confusion… as this is why suffixes went away.
I thought the reason for
I thought the reason for NVIDIA not having a GK110 chip with the full 2880 CUDA cores active was that it was near impossible to manufacturer.
Basically yeah. But, over the
Basically yeah. But, over the course of a year, they might have collected enough to do a product run.
I LOVED the 8800 Ultra – it
I LOVED the 8800 Ultra – it was such a great card. I miss it.