NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X Review - PAGE 1

With NVIDIA's Maxwell GPU-based cards, notably the impressive GTX 980, the chipmaker set a new standard in the video card market. Their previous flagship card had a Maxwell GM204 GPU using the same 28nm manufacturing process found in previous generation Kepler GPUs, yet it managed to overall provide comparable performance at 1080p resolution. The GTX 980 also managed to widen the performance gap when it came to 4K gaming, all with an impressively low TDP of just 165W. That, however, wouldn't be NVIDIA's last chapter in the Maxwell saga!

On the second day of the Game Developer Conference (GDC) that took place in San Fransisco earlier this month, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang made a surprise appearance during Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney's keynote concerning Unreal Engine 4 and VR (virtual reality) technology. During this friendly keynote-hijack, Huang announced what he promised to be the fastest, most powerful graphics card in the world, the GTX Titan X. Looking at the big picture and considering where PC and console gaming in general seems to be heading, it's no surprise that NVIDIA's next flagship GPU was announced as an answer to Sweeney's question about the existence of a video card capable of mustering enough power to take on the increasing demands of the gaming industry.

During this initial reveal, only a few pieces of information about NVIDIA’s next flagship GPU were made available. The Titan X is based on the Maxwell architecture and comes with 12 GB of memory and 8 billion transistors. While not enough to give a concrete idea about performance levels, it certainly did its part in creating a great deal of anticipation in the tech-world as well as some crazy rumors across the net. The official release will be made today, March 17, 2015 during the GTC (GPU Technology Conference) opening keynote featuring NVIDIA's Huang… again!

The black-armored Titan X I will be looking at today comes with the same exclusive graphics features offered by the latest Maxwell GPUs such as: Multi-Frame sampled AA (MFAA), DirectX 12 support, Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR), Voxel Global Illumination (VGI), and VR capability. The Titan X is based on the GM200 GPU in its full implementation in what NVIDIA labels as a "Gaming Beast". The new Maxwell GM200 packs quite a punch and comes equipped with six Graphics Processing Clusters, each having a dedicated raster engine and four Streaming Multiprocessors. The 24 Streaming Multiprocessors account for 128 CUDA cores each for a total of 3072. In terms of memory, the Titan X comes with 12288MB of GDDR5 RAM running on a 384-bit interface for a total 336.5 GB/s bandwidth. If we do the math, that's a 50% increase compared to the GTX 980. With such high CUDA core count and solid memory subsystem, the new Titan X should show us some nice numbers in 4K gaming.

Specifications:

Info coutresy of NVIDIA