So much rumour and speculation out there at the moment regarding what's coming next!
From what I've read on the ever reliable internet recently, it's suggested that AMD are delaying their "8000" series until next year potentially. To be fair though, the current 7000 series are excellent cards giving good value for money. Additionally, with recent driver updates a 7970 is often seen beating a 680 - something it didn't do at launch. possibly NV will respond with their own huge performance boosting drivers, however, from what I've seen so far, the 310.* series and on appear to be improving image quality (sharpness) while not offering a huge boost. Possibly this will change.
The Titan...speculation suggests that this might be a one-off card. It potentially offers some massive performance, however it's not a "flagship" card as that suggests the top model in a range, there is no Titan "range" as far as I can tell, it's just a one-off in the consumer market - I am of course aware of it's K20 roots.
If Titan offers, as some speculate, 690 performance in gaming but stronger Compute AND it come in at a similar price point to a 690 then it might be an attractive card to the enthusiast. As a water cooler, I always factor in the cost of blocks and as such a single 690 is fairly good value solution vs. 2x 680's due to the cost of blocks. The Titan might slip into this category too.
Make no mistake, based on what information we have the Titan could be considered more of a marketing "look what we can do" exercise than anything expected to make money. But, really, isn't any "x2" type like that - even though the Titan is supposedly a single GPU.
I am eager to see some real information on the Titan, and I really hope it's the beast that much of the speculation suggests it is. Not because I'd buy one, but purely because I love this shit if you'll excuse the language.
What if Titan did offer near 690 performance and came it at around £600? What if water blocks were available? That would make a nice single card solution potentially. As of yet we really don't know what the 700 series will bring, we all hope for "full fat" Kepler, but I suspect that we'll actually just get current Keplar refined, with Titan being the only "full fat" option. NV after all need to make money doing this.
Oh, I was firmly in the camp that the "680" was really the "660" when the 600's came out, they were just so small (die size, few transistors) and so frugal on their power needs that I could not comprehend them ever having been intended as true high-end. It was a total turn around too - NV were usually the one with the power-hungry, hot large GPU's. They also excelled at compute vs. AMD's "pure gaming" cards. With the 600 series things were reversed, now AMD has the (comparitively) power-hungry GPU's, they improved their Compute performance whereas NV are now focused on gaming.
Anyway, I'm rambling again...
Scoob.