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.