Even though the Titan maintains some of the Tesla cards' research-centric benefits, it has been slightly watered down to hit a sub-$1,000 price point. Disabling valuable features like HyperQ doesn't make the Titan any cheaper to produce than the K20, but as an invaluable tool for researchers, its absence prevents it from attracting the "wrong" customers, that is, scientific types looking for a cheaper alternative to the K20. Thus, Nvidia can enter a different market without cannibalizing its grip on another, and PC gamers get the chance to harness the next evolution of Nvidia's GPU technology at a fraction of the cost.

Benchmarks

The computer that we used for testing was provided by Origin PC, and it arrived stuffed with not one, but three GTX Titans, among other impressive parts. Here's the complete rundown of the relevant components:

Let's take a look at how the Titan performs in single-card and SLI solutions with some of today's most demanding PC games.

No matter what card you throw Crysis 3 at, it will get pushed to its limit. You might expect that a $999 card would be able to get better frames out of any game, but keep in mind that this is Crysis 3 with every setting maxed out at 1920x1080. Lowering motion blur and post-processing settings will immediately boost these numbers, and the game will still retain its remarkable visuals.

Batman: Arkham City - Max Settings

The Titan clearly crushes Arkham City. While the game doesn't scale in performance quite relative to the number of cards in use, dedicating a card solely to PhysX produces better results than running three cards with dynamic PhysX assignment, where the CPU would also be a viable candidate for processing.

Metro 2033 - Max Settings

Metro 2033 may not be as much of a resource hog as Crysis 3, but it's no slouch. A wealth of post-processing effects and PhysX can tax any card, but as with Arkham City, dedicating a Titan card to PhysX yields impressive results.

Battlefield 3 - Max Settings

Battlefield 3 is another game capable of proving your system's worth, and unlike with Metro 2033 or Crysis, the Titan performs well above par.

Total War: Shogun 2 - Max Settings

Total War: Shogun 2 may not appear as visually stunning as some of the other games we benchmarked, but there can be hundreds of units on the battlefield at any given time, and in this case, HDR lighting increases the tax on the GPU(s).

The Witcher 2 - Max Settings

The "ubersampling" option in The Witcher 2 almost pushes the Titan to its limits, but it's nothing that a single card can't handle. The technique is one of the most inefficient anti-aliasing techniques, even more so than FSAA (Full Screen Anti-Aliasing). While this isn't an exact calculation, expect ubersampling to halve your frame rates. Turning off ubersampling kept the frame rate above 100fps during most of our test run, for example.

Is a Titan worth $999?

Anyone shelling out just over a grand (post tax) on a graphics card expects top-of-the-line performance. The Titan's primary competition would be Nvidia's own GTX 690 (the equivalent of two GTX 680s) or a pair of cheaper graphics cards working in tandem, but you'd have to deal with increased power consumption and heat with the latter option. You could survive on, say, a single GTX 680 for about $500, with max settings in most games, running at a reasonable clip (30fps or higher). But if you want, or need, the highest frame rate possible, along with every graphical flourish under the sun, and you aren't confined to a pesky budget, the GTX Titan should be at the top of your shopping list.