Why Are NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Cards Going 6GB?

Over the weekend, EVGA shocked us by announcing that the company would be coming out with GeForce GTX 780 6GB video card models. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 and GeForce GTX Titan share the same GPU and are mainly differentiated by the amount of memory that they have and how well they handle Double Precision. The GK110 GPU used on all GTX 780 and Titan products support double-precision floating-point math. This feature is intended solely for the GPU computing market and means virtually nothing to gamers. From what we have been told, NVIDIA reduces the double-precision speed of its non-Titan cards in the driver, making them run at 1/8 of what they’re capable of. This is done so NVIDIA doesn’t undercut its Tesla cards in the High Performance Computing market that use the same GPU.

So, back to the EVGA GeForce GTX 780 6GB video card models. These new cards will be available soon at a starting MSRP of $549.99. That is pretty amazing considering the GeForce GTX Titan was $999.99 and the base EVGA GeForce GTX 780 3GB card was available for $519.99. You are basically getting a GeForce GTX Titan without the enhanced double-precision performance for a fraction of the cost. It gets better though! EVGA has told Legit Reviews that a GTX 780 Ti 6GB card is in the works. No timeline or pricing was given, but that would severely undercut the just released NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan Black series that was announced just last month.

What is NVIDIA doing? Could NVIDIA be trying to take away the luster of having 4GB of memory on the AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB cards by allowing the Add-In-Board (AIB) partners to put 6GB of memory on the GTX 780 series cards? Most consumers will easily believe that having 6GB of memory will make the card better than one that has just 3GB or 4GB. NVIDIA could also just be getting ready to take on the 4K multi-monitor gaming market, albeit that is very small right now.

Our own internal 4K testing on GeForce GTX 780 Ti cards at 3840×2160 show that you can easily fill up the 3GB frame buffer on GeForce GTX 780 cards though, so we are all for having 6GB of memory on these cards. We just don’t know where the NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan Black fits in the product stack if those cards come out as planned. No gamer that we know needs double-precision floating-point math, unless there is someone out there that takes their work home on the weekends and wants to play games as well! It looks like the NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan will be the budget friendly card for CUDA developers and the upcoming GeForce GTX 780 Ti 6GB cards will be the card to have for gaming.