About three years ago we got our first wait at Nvidia'southward Kepler architecture that powered the GTX 680, a $500 card packing 3.54 billion transistors and 192GB/southward bandwidth. It was the end of the line for the GeForce 600 series, but it wasn't the end for the Kepler compages.

While we eagerly awaited for next-gen GeForce 700 cards, Nvidia dropped the GeForce GTX Titan, wielding 7.08 billion transistors for an unwieldy price of $one,000. The Titan instantly claimed king of the colina, and even though the Radeon R9 290X brought similar performance for half the price six months afterward, Nvidia refused to budge on the Titan's MSRP.

This was every gamer'due south dream GPU for half a yr, but its fate was sealed when the GTX 780 Ti shipped many months later (November/thirteen), offering more CUDA cores at a more affordable $700.

Although the GTX Titan was great for gaming, that wasn't the sole purpose of the GPU, which was equipped with 64 double-precision cores for 1.3 teraflops of double-precision performance. Previously merely found in Tesla workstations and supercomputers, this feature fabricated the Titan platonic for students, researchers and engineers afterward consumer-level supercomputing performance.

A twelvemonth subsequently the original Titan's release, Nvidia followed up with a total 2880-core version known every bit the Titan Black, which additional the card's double-precision performance 1.7 teraflops. A month later, the GTX Titan Z put two Titan Blacks on one PCB for 2.7 teraflops of compute ability, though this card never made sense at $3,000 -- triple the Titan Black'due south cost.

Since then, the Maxwell-based GeForce 900 serial arrived with the GTX 980'southward unbeatable operation vs. ability ratio leading the charge as today's undisputed single-GPU king. Given that the GTX 980 has a modest 2048 cores using five.2 billion transistors in a small 398mm2 die area, it manages to exist 29% smaller with 26% fewer transistors than the flagship Kepler parts.

We knew at that place would be more than ahead for Maxwell and so here it comes. Half-dozen months afterwards the GTX 980, Nvidia is dorsum with the GeForce GTX Titan X, a menu that's bigger and more complex than any other. Still, unlike previous Titan GPUs, the new Titan 10 is designed exclusively for loftier-end gaming and as such offers similar compute functioning similar to the GTX 980.

Announced at GDC, in that location's plenty to be psyched about: headline features include 3072 CUDA cores, 12GB of GDDR5 memory running at 7Gbps, and a whopping eight billion transistors. At its top, the GTX Titan 10 will deliver 6600 GFLOPS single precision and 206 GFLOPS double precision processing power.

Nvidia reserved pricing information to the terminal minute as they delivered the opening keynote at their GPU Engineering Conference -- unsurprisingly the Titan X volition exist $999. But without getting bogged down in how stupid that was -- let's focus on the fact that nosotros get to bear witness yous how the GTX Titan X performs and that it's a hard launch with availability expected today.

Titan X'due south GM200 GPU in Item

The GeForce Titan 10 is a processing powerhorse. The GM200 chip carries half dozen graphics processing clusters, 24 streaming multiprocessors with 3072 CUDA cores (single precision).

Equally noted before, the Titan features a core configuration that consists of 3072 SPUs which take care of pixel/vertex/geometry shading duties, while texture filtering is performed by 192 texture units. With a base clock frequency of 1000MHz, texture filtering rate is 192 Gigatexels/sec, which is over 33% higher than the GTX 980. The Titan 10 also ships with 3MB of L2 cache and 96 ROPs.

The retention subsystem of GTX Titan X consists of six 64-fleck retention controllers (384-bit) with 12GB of GDDR5 memory. This means that the 384-bit wide retentiveness interface and 7GHz memory clock deliver a acme memory bandwidth that is fifty% higher than GTX 980 at 336.5GB/sec.

And with its massive 12GB of GDDR5 retention, gamers can play the latest DX12 games on the Titan X at 4K resolutions without worrying about running short on graphics memory.

Nvidia says that the Titan X is built using the total implementation of GM200. The display/video engines are unchanged from the GM204 GPU used in the GTX 980. Also similar the GTX 980, overall double-precision instruction throughput is 1/32 the rate of single-precision instruction throughput.

As mentioned, the base clock speed of the GTX Titan X is 1000MHz, though it does feature a typical Heave Clock speed of 1075MHz. The Boost Clock speed is based on the average Titan 10 card running a wide diversity of games and applications. Note that the actual Boost Clock will vary from game to game depending on actual organization conditions.

Setting performance aside for a moment, 1 of the Titan Ten's other noteworthy features is its stunning lath design. As was the example with previous Titan cards, the Titan 10 has an aluminum cover. The metal casing gives the board a premium look and feel, while the card's unique black cover sets information technology apart from predecessors -- this is the Darth Vader of Titans.

A copper vapor bedroom is used to absurd the Titan Ten's GM200 GPU. This vapor chamber is combined with a big, dual-slot aluminum heatsink to misemploy oestrus off the chip. A blower style fan and then exhausts this hot air through the back of the graphics card and outside the PC's chassis. The fan is designed to run very quietly, even while under load when the bill of fare is overclocked.

If you lot call up, the GTX 980 reference lath design included a backplate on the underside of the menu with a section that could be removed in order to amend airflow when multiple GTX 980 cards are placed directly side by side to each other (as with 3- and 4-fashion SLI, for example). In social club to provide maximum airflow to the Titan X's cooler in these situations, Nvidia does not include a backplate on the Titan X reference.

The Titan Ten reference board measures 10.5" long. Display outputs include i dual-link DVI output, one HDMI 2.0 output and 3 DisplayPort connectors. One viii-pin PCIe ability connector and one 6-pin PCIe power connector are required for operation.

Speaking of ability connectors, the Titan X has a TDP rating of 250 watts and Nvidia calls for a 600w power supply when running but a unmarried carte du jour. That is a little over 50% higher than the TDP rating of the GTX 980, though it is nevertheless fourteen% lower than the Radeon R9 290X.

Nvidia says that being a gaming enthusiast's graphics card, the Titan Ten has been designed for overclocking and implements a six-phase power supply with overvoltaging adequacy. An additional two-phase power supply is dedicated for the board's GDDR5 memory.

This half dozen+two phase pattern supplies Titan X with more than than enough power, even when the board is overclocked. The Titan X reference board design supplies the GPU with 275 watts of power at the maximum power target setting of 110%.

Nvidia has used polarized capacitors (POSCAPS) to minimize unwanted board noise as well as molded inductors. To farther better Titan X's overclocking potential, Nvidia has improved airflow to these board components so they run cooler compared to previous high-cease GK110 products, including the original GTX Titan.

Moreover, Nvidia says it pushed the Titan X to speeds of one.4GHz using nothing more than the supplied air-cooler during its own testing, and then we're obviously interested in testing that.