You may have seen or heard the rumors about the GTX 790 and Titan Black Edition. Both we believe are possible cards at some point but there is no reason to get excited even if they are real. In addition a lot of the rumors and associated specs that are floating around the web right now seem more like recycled rumors from a month or two prior to the TI announcement. They didn’t make sense then and they still don’t make sense now.
Titan Black Edition – Same as the old titan but fully unlocked cores on the GK110 this time. Still keeps compute functionality. Unless you also need the extra VRAM or the double precision for compute, there is no point in buying this card for gaming. A Classified or Lightning edition 780 TI will do far better. Because this card doesn’t make sense for gaming then Nvidia may only be hurting their actual compute card sales *if* they decide to release it. Yes people will still buy it even though they shouldn’t.
GTX 790 – while Nvidia has a history of releasing absolutely horrible dual GPU cards (GTX590, GTX690) the rumors on this one is that it has 2*2496 core GK110s with a 320 bit bus and 2*5GB of VRAM.
Here’s why that doesn’t make sense. Nvidia doesn’t believe in VRAM. With the exception of the Titan which was really an entry level compute card, Nvidia has always given the enthusiasts the bare minimum of VRAM to not lose sales. In addition 5GB would mean the PCB will be huge. Nvidia’s dual cards tend to be designed to be less than 2 single cards so that power and size are kept in check. 5GB doesn’t fit with that. Also the 320 bit bus doesn’t make sense at all. Nvidia don’t strip down bus width unless they are trying to find a reason to purposefully hamper a product e.g. 660TI vs 670. There is no reason to hamper the 790 because it should be designed to do as well as it possibly can within a certain power envelope. Even the 2496 cores doesn’t make sense because Nvidia would then be releasing another SKU of chips when they could just use the 780 SKU (2304 cores) or even the Titan SKU (2688 cores). While it’s possible that Nvidia could have been sitting on a bunch of dies that exceeded 780 yield but didn’t make titan yield it again just doesn’t make sense given past history. Nvidia normally keep the core count the same on the dual card but reduce clocks to fit a power envelope. The 2496 core rumor made sense for the TI because people thought Nvidia wouldn’t obsolete Titan.
All of these rumors came from Videocardz.com which didn’t of course cite a source. Every other site talking about it are basing their information off of the VC article which is just lazy. Now we could be wrong, and let’s face it, we also didn’t think Nvidia would release a fully enabled GK110 in the TI. But even if the rumors are true, they don’t matter because if they are true, then you really shouldn’t buy these cards anyway!
Here’s the poorly photoshopped image that VC showed:
