Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan Z launch delayed by inefficient drivers

Nvidia Corp. has already begun to ship its GeForce GTX Titan Z graphics cards to various distributors and stores, but it does not let them start sales before the official launch. The latter is postponed by the lack of drivers which enable the graphics card to show its full performance potential. Nvidia still wants to make the Titan Z the world’s most powerful graphics adapter, so it is working on a new driver.

Hermitage Akihabara reports that select Nvidia partners in Japan have already received their GeForce GTX Titan Z graphics cards and have them in stock, which means that specifications of the boards (i.e., clock-rates of GPU and memory) have been finalized and will not be changed. The stores are not allowed to start sales of the new dual-GPU flagship graphics solutions before Nvidia officially launches the product. At present Nvidia partners are not aware of any new launch dates, so it is completely unknown when does Nvidia plans to start selling its Titan Z.

Apparently, performance of the GeForce GTX Titan Z is behind Nvidia’s expectations and the graphics card, which price starts at $3000 (£2330, €2835) without taxes, is not the highest-performing graphics card in the world (which means that it fails to outperform the AMD Radeon R9 295X2 in a number of benchmarks). At present the company is working hard to boost its performance by improving multi-GPU scalability in the drivers, reports TechPowerUp. Once the drivers are ready, Nvidia is expected to formally release the product and let its partners to start sales.

While such a strategy makes a lot of sense, it should be noted that AMD is not standing still and continues to refine its Catalyst drivers and multi-GPU scalability to boost performance of the Radeon R9 295X2 dual-GPU flagship graphics card that costs $1500/£1100. Therefore, by the time Nvidia releases its new drivers, AMD might release a new Catalyst driver.

Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan Z is based on two Nvidia GK110 graphics processors in their maximum configuration with 2880 stream processors (as well as 240 texture units and 48 raster operations pipelines) that run at 705MHz in default mode and 889MHz in “boost” mode. The board is equipped with 12GB of GDDR5 memory (6GB with 384-bit bus per GPU) that operates at 7.0GHz effective frequency. The graphics solution boasts 5760 compute units in total and delivers around 8TFLOPS of single-precision compute performance.

Last week an Nvidia official said that the GeForce GTX Titan Z graphics card would be available on the market during the second quarter of company’s fiscal year (May – July).

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KitGuru Says: A good news is that Nvidia is confident that it would be able to make the GeForce GTX Titan Z the world’s fastest single-card graphics solution. A bad news is that Nvidia will release the new graphics card “when it’s done”, which means an unknown date.

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