NVIDIA GTX Titan at $999 in 2013 Set the Stage for Sky-High GPU Prices

NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX Titan in February 2013 at a price of 999 USD (about $999) in the US and 7999 CNY (about $1,172) in China. The card set a new high for single-GPU flagship pricing at the time.

GK110 core powered the first $999 flagship

The GTX Titan used the GK110 core with 7.1 billion transistors and 2688 CUDA cores. It delivered 1.3 TFlops of double-precision performance and 4.5 TFlops of single-precision performance. The card was derived from the Tesla K20X professional compute card used in the Titan supercomputer.

Subsequent Titan series prices rose over the years. The Titan X launched at $999, and the Titan RTX reached $2499. More recently, the RTX 3090 launched at 11999 yuan, the RTX 4090 at 12999 yuan, and the RTX 5090 now sells for around 34000 yuan. In 13 years, flagship GPU prices have increased more than fourfold.

At the time of launch, PConline asked, "Why is this thing so expensive?" The GTX Titan's pricing set a precedent that would shape the GPU market for years to come.