Nvidia releases $3000 Titan Z

Real-time shading/rendering is essentially a massively parallel operation -- the exact type of problems that GPUs (and supercomputers in general) are good for.

In fact, many of the top supercomputers today use GPUs.

Dual-GPU...so not very good for VR gaming. The only reason you'd want such an expensive high-end GPU is to be future proof with VR gaming at 4k/120fps. But dual-GPUs aren't great for VR gaming.

Nvidia needs another card between the normal Titan and this one, that's a single card, and is targeted at VR gaming, and costs $1500 at most.

Most of the current comments are along the lines of "You will only need this card if you are doing _____". ie "Gaming at 4k", "Parallel Compute".

I think it's pretty clear this is a halo product, but I want to point out that having two non-crippled gpu's on a stick is an impressive technical achievement. Sure they will be throttled when the heat constraints kick in, but I am excited to see this sort of technology trickle down into the next "Asus 760 Mars" product.

Yep. And it would probably be good for altcoins indeed. It just can't be a good bitcoin miner because the ASICs are already out there. If an altcoin can be mined with an ASIC (I believe the purpose of some, like litecoin, are not to be?) then it is near pointless to mine with a GPU (unless in a pool).

Also, I would assume the reason behind supercomputers not being good for gaming is that they are parallelized in ways other than the chips on the GPU (entire machines are networked together via various interfaces). The software behind distributing the processing between several machines, or whatever aspect makes it super, is probably what limits the ability of supercomputers to run video games :0

Keep in mind that even if you're maxing the in-game settings, you aren't maxing out the image quality fully. You can still go beyond that with supersampling (essentially rendering at a higher resolution, then downscaling to your monitor's resolution in order to prevent aliasing). Standard anti-aliasing tries to detect edges in order to find specific parts of the image to supersample, but it isn't perfect. If you want the best image quality possible, supersampling is the way to go.

The downside though is that it's extremely resource intensive. Even 16x MSAA antialiasing is faster than 2x supersampling. With supersampling, at 2x on 1080p you're rendering at 3840x2160 then scaling down to 1080p - effectively the same as gaming on 4k.

I have two rigs, one with dual r9 270s and another with SLI'd gtx 760s. Each can run dota 2 at 2560x1600 with 2x supersampling at around 40 and 30fps respectively.

The image quality is beautiful, don't get me wrong, but even those cards in an SLI isn't enough to push that amount of pixels.

With quad Titan Z's, you could probably do 4x supersampling - nearing the quality you'd get with source film maker, but in real time.