So confusing. Some experts on this forum told me that there was no price hike, and there was just a shift. That the Titan was just cancelled, and the real Titan is the 2080ti, and there was just miscommunication from Nvidia regarding the "rebrand". So now the price hike is real as the 2080ti is no longer the Titan?
Titans post the original gk100 have been largely gaming cards. Post Kepler, Titan and its high pricing was largely early admission fee for a big die for gaming.
The titan brand has been mostly an early adopter tax since the loss of the double precision. Part of the reason for this is Nvidia needed to curb demand of these parts because they were larger, had worse yields and NV wanted to maximize its profits which meant a clear separation in pricing between GP102 and GP104 until supply and yields of GP102 were at a point where the supply volume of GP102 was at high enough levels that the sales of GP102 that were former GP104 sales at that price point without selling out.
As you can see even now, the RTX 2080 ti is the card selling out even with the price gap between it and the rest of the RTX which means pricing could be even higher.
So what does the Titans before this and the RTX 2080 ti have in common? Its a big die released relatively early(actually even earlier compared to the rest of the previous Titans) and needs a high price because at lower pricing destroys demand and pricing of GT104.
The RTX 2080 ti was released at the same time as the RTX 2080, way earlier than earlier Titans. As a result, Nvidia is not getting that shot to improve on yields for the RTX 2080 ti where the volume supplied at 2080 ti is good enough that it could supply at the 700 dollar price point would enough the offset the loss in volume/sales of the RTX 2080 at that pricing. As a result and much like the earlier titans, there needs to be a big gap in price so people buy the RTX 2080's at 700/800.
So although not a titan card in name, the RTX 2080 ti/pricing serves the same purpose. It is a top performing big die gaming card released early that needs clear price separation to not interfere with RTX 2080 sales at the upper end of consumer graphics cards. If Nvidia got to stagger this launch like earlier years or simply release the RTX 2080 ti later, it would have come at a lower price tag.
So why the name change then anyways? This ironically started because of AMD. Remember the AMD frontier edition? The one with double memory and pseudo support for pro applications? This card although unsuccessful in terms of sales caused Nvidia to do something which increased the value of peoples Titans. That was they gave them semi professional drivers to match up with the frontier editions which were originally 1000/1500 dollar cards.
Since the original Titans did not have drivers to support professional applications, the titans Xp didn't look so hot and were exposed as not being really semi professional card but just big gaming cards. AMD provided partial pro drivers with the frontier edition, Nvidia considered it a threat and stepped up the drivers for the titan XP and made them semi pro cards.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/6qtf9b/titan_x_pascal_benches_with_the_new_38512_driver/
https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/...2018-for-adobe-premiere-autocad-vray-and-more
Compare the Titan XP to the GTX 1080 ti and you will see it performs more like a GTX quadro p6000 because of the driver support in driver applications. This mean't titan XP pricing was simply too cheap now and would start to eat into Nvidia's lucrative professional market sales.
Even without pro drivers, the RTX 2080 ti is a reasonably good workstation card. How give it the same driver treatment as the Titan Xp, you would have an outstandingly good workstation price when combined with it's top tier gaming performance, which simply has too much of a value for semi pro target market. Enough to eat into quadro sales. So what was likely to happen and did happen after these drivers were given was an increase in price had to happen along with some branding to signify this distinct market.