For gamers single-GPU performance is still a very important deal. If you thought it was hard enough to get software to scale evenly over multiple CPU cores wait till you hear the moaning about multi-GPU setups. Despite major leaps in getting multi-GPU setups to work reliably and efficiently it’s still a bit clunky to get two separate chips to double the performance of one. So, in a nutshell, we still care about which single-GPU card is the fastest.
Not too long ago we were talking about the GTX 980, which currently remains the king of GPU performance, although we’d still pick the GTX 970 9 out of ten times ourselves. It seems now though that the belt might be heading for a new owner as Nvidia teazes the Titan X, by all accounts a bruiser of a card.
We are still weeks away at this point from getting all the details, but it seems many of the latest tech and VR demos at the 2015 Game Developer Conference were running on Titan X cards. Why not just use GTX 980s? We, like many must assume it’s because the Titan X spanks that card in terms of real-world performance. Those Unreal Engine 4 demos were very impressive after all.
So for now this is what we think we know, based on various tech media reports, although this could all be wrong. Here goes:
The GPU is called the GM200 and is a 28Nm Maxwell part
Cards seen at the conference were using six and eight pin power, so it’s in the same league as previous top-end cards. Maxwell is pretty efficient though, so this isn’t a surprise.
Eight billion(!) transistors. That’s a possible 50% increase in shader processors versus the GTX 980
12GB of frame buffer, not a crazy number for a Quadro card, but insane for a gaming product.
It’s going to be expensive - we’re just going on a hunch here.
Previous Titan cards have not disappointed and it seems as if Nvidia will be going all out on this one. It’s also once again becoming harder and harder to decide if the advantages of a Quadro or FirePro workstation card are worth it in the face of ultra high-end cards like these.
Are you excited for the Titan X? Would you consider one for professional use? One thing is for sure, the next few weeks are going to be long one’s.
leaps in getting multi-GPU setups to work reliably and efficiently it’s still a bit clunky to get two separate chips to double the performance of one. So, in a nutshell, we still care about which single-GPU card is the fastest.
