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Nvidia's $2,500 Titan RTX is its most powerful prosumer GPU yet

The new "T-Rex" has fundamentally the same specs as Nvidia's Quadro RTX 6000 -- for $3,800 less.

Lori Grunin Senior Editor / Advice
I've been reviewing hardware and software, devising testing methodology and handed out buying advice for what seems like forever; I'm currently absorbed by computers and gaming hardware, but previously spent many years concentrating on cameras. I've also volunteered with a cat rescue for over 15 years doing adoptions, designing marketing materials, managing volunteers and, of course, photographing cats.
Expertise Photography, PCs and laptops, gaming and gaming accessories
Lori Grunin
2 min read
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Nvidia

Nvidia's Titan cards have always walked a fine line between the gamer-oriented GeForce and the professionally targeted Quadro. They're basically Quadro-power cards with GeForce-capability drivers. That historically plops them into the really, really expensive gaming GPU category or on the lists of video professionals who demand speed and value more than certification.

The new $2,499 Titan RTX, a Turing-architecture-based card that Nvidia announced Monday, adds even more of that power to the mix. It should still appeal to gamers, especially those who want to play Metro Exodus in 8K when it arrives in 2019. But the architecture's optimized ray-tracing and AI-acceleration cores also make it an option for more dataset-focused research, AI and machine-learning development and real-time 3D professional work that doesn't require workstation-class drivers.

The distinction between the GeForce and Quadro cards is waning over time as applications drift away from OpenGL. Adobe's  video applications such as Premiere and After Effects, for example, use the CUDA cores directly for acceleration. But Photoshop is still the elephant in that room. You can still only get 30-bit color support (10 bits per channel) with the workstation drivers, which are restricted to Quadro cards.

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It's hard to make direct comparisons solely based on specs, in part because Nvidia is inconsistent about the specs it provides at launch. You usually have to wait a little bit until people dig in and ferret them out. 

Most of the specs Nvidia's provided for the $6,300 Quadro RTX 6000 and the $2,499 Titan RTX are almost identical -- the Quadro does have a faster base GPU clock speed and four DisplayPort connectors vs. the Titan's three. So I can't wait to find out what magic the Quadro performs that merits an almost $4,000 premium. Given that neither GPu is shipping yet (the Quadro's in preorder and the Titan is slated for the end of November), we'll have to wait and see.

On the flipside, the less-endowed Quadro RTX 5000 only costs $200 less than the Titan RTX, so you give up quite a bit of power in exchange for those workstation certifications.

As a gaming card, it looks like it'll fit right into its traditional slot as a power bump up from the highest-end GeForce. But unless it delivers a bigger performance gap than the previous generation's GTX 1080 Ti/Titan Xp, it will be doubly not worth it at twice the price of the RTX 2080 Ti. Or it will be, at least, until more games ship which take advantage of its ray-tracing processors.

Comparative specifications


GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (Founders Edition)Quadro RTX 5000Quadro RTX 6000Titan RTXTitan Xp
GPU TU102TU104TU102TU102GP102
Memory 11GB GDDR616GB GDDR624GB GDDR624GB GDDR612GB GDDR5X
Memory bandwidth 616GB/sec448GB/sec672GB/sec672GB/sec547.7GB/sec
GPU clock Speed (MHz, base/boost) 1,350/1,6351,620/1,8151,440/1,7701,350M/1,7701,405/1,582
Memory data rate/Interface n/a/352 bitn/a/256 bitn/a/384 bit14Gbps/384 bit11.4Gbps/384 bit
Texture fill rate (gigatexels per second) 420.2348.5509.8510379.7
Ray Tracing (Gigarays per second) 1081011n/a
RT cores 68487272n/a
RTX-OPS (trillions) 786284n/an/a
CUDA Cores 4,3523,0724,6084,6083,840
Tensor Cores 544384576576n/a
FP32 (TFLOPS, max) 1411.216.3n/a12.1
Price $1,200 $2,300 $6,300 $2,500$1,200
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Correction, 12:55 p.m. PT: An earlier headline on this story had the incorrect price for the Nvidia Titan RTX. It costs $2,500.

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