July 22, 2016

In a true testament to just how fast graphics card technology can evolve – Nvidia has announced the “Titan X”, based upon its brand new Pascal architecture (Not to be confused with a similarly named previous generation card). If you thought the heft Geforce 1080 was a bit overkill for anything other than impressing your friends, you haven’t met the $1200 USD TITAN X just yet. Prepare to max out your credit cards or take out a second mortgage because it is quite clear Nvidia isn’t messing around with this latest card.

So what kind of computing power does the price of a one bedroom apartment in most North American cities get you? Here are just a few of the frightening technical specs for the Geforce Titan X:

11 Teraflops of Computing Power
1531 MHZ Core Boost Clock Speed
3584 CUDA Cores (!!! – That is more than 1000 more cores than the recently released Geforce 1080)
16 GB of DDR 5 RAM
HDMI 2.0B, Display Port and DVI Ports (exact number of ports currently unknown).

What requires this much power? Absolutely nothing if you are playing games at 1080P (the resolution, not the card) and if you are using a Geforce 1080 (the card not the resolution) then you can expect the Titan X to surpass that cards ability to produce 50 FPS+ on 4K games on ultra settings easily. If it isn’t apparent just yet, it is quite clear that the Titan X is more of a workstation card for content creators rather than a high end prosumer graphics card.

It is at this point I’d say “well how does it compare to AMD’s offerings?” But, honestly, Team Red doesn’t have anything that could possibly compare to the price point or computing power of the Titan X just yet. AMD recently launched the Radeon 480 – an excellent card, I’ve got one in my gaming rig, but that card and Nvidia’s own budget friendly Geforce 1060 are in a completely different market when compared to the Titan X. In fact the raw computing power of the Titan X along is the same as two Radeon 480 if you ran both at maximum efficiency (I’m talking about theoretical computing power with this example, not a crossfire setup). Perhaps AMDs next set of high-end GPUS, codenamed VEGAS, will offer Geforce 1080 or Titan X levels of performance.

So will you be forking over a chunk of your mortgage / rent payment for a new graphics card? Let us know in the comments section.

Bethesda Software’s annual gathering in Texas to celebrate the various long-running id Software franchises, debut new titles and allow attendees to get the exclusive scoop on upcoming games kicks off in less than two weeks on Thursday August 4th and runs until the 7th.

The publisher is promising the world gameplay premiere of Quake Champions, which was revealed at last month’s E3 Expo. Two other large titles will also be demonstrated, however these demos are for attendees only – the rebooted Prey and Arkane Studios’ Dishonored 2 will have exclusive main stage demonstrations during the opening presentation.

Live-Streamed Events

For those of us who can’t be in Texas to join in the celebrations a number of panels from QuakeCon 2016 will be broadcast on Bethesda’s official Twitch channel. Multiple presentations center around various aspects of the critically acclaimed DOOM including a presentation about the game’s well documented development cycle, the technical prowess of the idTech 6 engine and a discussion of the art direction choices that lead to the creation of Hell.

Here are two of the live-streamed panels that I find the most interesting:

Panel: Creating Worlds: A Discussion About Bringing Life to Games, Movies, and Books
Moderated by Andrea Rene and Geoff Keighley
3:30pm – 4:30pm | Streaming Live from Topaz Room

Panel: Bringers of DOOM
Moderated by David Houghton (GamesRadar+)
3:00pm – 4:00pm | Streaming Live from Topaz Room

On-Site Activities

There are lots of other activities available to attendees who are going to be joining Bethesda in person: World famous speed runner Draqu is going to attempt to speedrun the Doom single-player alongside members of the development team. An entire Expo hall featuring 27 different vendors including high profile PC parts manufacturers like NVidia and chair manufacturer DX Racer will be on hand for all three days of QuakeCon 2016.

For complete details make sure to check out the official QuakeCon schedule page. Personally I am most hyped for the debut look at Quake Champions (will it live up to my memories of Quake III?) and the panel on Doom’s development – I wonder if they will acknowledge the scrapped “Call of Doom” prototype from a few years back?

Newly Announced Geforce Titan X Will Blow You Away & Take All Your Money

QuakeCon Event Schedule & Live-Streams Revealed

Live-Streamed Events

On-Site Activities