Nvidia's first consumer Volta GPU is the monstrous Titan V

Nvidia's first consumer Volta GPU is the monstrous Titan V

If you have $3,000 burning a hole in your pocket and want to be one of the first to own a Volta GPU from Nvidia's new graphics card line up, the Titan V is now available. The monstrous design combines the astoundingly powerful new graphics chip from that range, which even beats out the likes of the Titan XP in terms of raw performance, and stacks it with 12GB of high-bandwidth memory 2.0 (HBM2), making it arguably the most powerful consumer graphics card ever released.

What Nvidia has effectively done with this design is take its already announced Tesla V100 commercial card and turned it into something that's more viable for consumers - even though it's still ungodly expensive. With 5,120 CUDA cores, 620 Tensor cores and a boost clock of 1,455MHz, this card should be able to handle absolutely anything you throw at it. 4K, UItra detail settings, virtual reality, augmented reality - anything you can find and probably more on top of it.

Granted, that's not really what a card like this is designed for. If you're looking to make a powerful gaming PC, you don't need to spend anywhere close to $3,000 to make it happen. The Volta range will no doubt contain cards that cost a few hundred dollars and maybe even up to $1,000 for the top-of-the-line offerings, and those will be almost as capable in games.

Where the Volta Titan V really stands out is its ability to leverage cloud computing. Every Titan V will be given free access to GPU-optimized deep learning software and the Nvidia GPU Cloud. That means that this card ladies and gentlemen, is designed to power artificial intelligence.

What that means for gaming cards remains to be seen. We will probably see a slightly cut down version of this card, but Nvidia doesn't typically release its most powerful cards first. So will we see something even more powerful in the future? it seems unlikely, but it's certainly exciting.