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This card is more expensive than all the hardware in my current PC, and I am running pretty high end gaming rig with 900D, GTX 680, 3700K, xonar, 16 GB of RAM, roomy SSD, velociraptor, Johny Guru 5 star rated PSU, and custom built water cooling.
Seems silly.
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A halo product is something that isn't there to be the real flagship that's driving the revenue, but instead to be the ultra-cool item that people really lust after, associate that with the brand, then buy one of the lower end models. For example, the Ford Shelby GT500 http://www.ford.com/cars/mustang/trim/shelbygt500/ is probably not even turning a profit for Ford, but when someone picks up an automotive magazine wi…
The Dodge Viper is probably a better example, as it's a totally custom chassis, body, etc. The GT500 still shares a LOT with a production Mustang, and al the economies of scale that imparts. It's also producded in very high quantities, 5000+ yearly. They're making money or they wouldn't buiild that many.
I've heard it explained that halo cars help create brand loyalty with an instinctual response similar to "My dad can beat up your dad" fights on the schoolyard.
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The point of this card is there are some people who want both.
But going from nearly perfectly smooth lines to perfectly smooth lines should not be a profitable market. Nobody will notice the difference during any real gameplay. You can already do great anti aliasing so why would someone pay $1000+ more for a 10% or less gain.
Why someone would buy it? There are a lot of people who want the very best. It's the same reason people buy an Aston Martin over a Toyota.
From a more practical perspective though, there's also future proofing. This card will be able to deliver high frame rates for a few generations of games. People who don't want to regularly rebuild their rigs might prefer this card.
I don't track gaming GPU requirements that much, but this strikes me as past high end. Is this even useful for gaming, or is it really aimed at doing crypto, cryptocurrency mining, simulations, etc?
The thing to note about this card is that it's a dual-GPU card - two chips with some sort of intra-card PCIE bus between them. You could get equivalent gaming performance by buying two of the GTX 780 Ti for about $1500. That level of performance is roughly what you want if you want to game at 4k resolutions at 60 FPS, so there are gaming applications for this card, even if it falls into "insanely high-end". The niche…
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison
ASIC won't play skyrim @ 4k though... :)