Technology has advanced more over the last 30 years than during the rest of human history. Think back to Pong, the Commodore 64, the Atari 2600, the Sega Saturn. Think back to the games we used to play. Look back at the earliest PlayStations and personal computers, at Half-Life, Medal of Honor, Tomb Raider, and Freelancer. Look back to Crysis, to Far Cry, to Call of Duty, and take a moment to appreciate just how far we’ve come in such a short space of time.
As long as there’s been silicon in processors, graphical fidelity has led the way in driving the consumer market forward, pushing manufacturers to test the limits of what they can achieve with each of those minuscule chips.
The Titan X is the epitome of this ethic, the yardstick against which all graphical performance is measured, and the pinnacle of Nvidia’s polygon-rendering arsenal. Each generation brings with it the absolute best of the best that Nvidia can muster, and if money is no object, it’s the solution to all your graphical troubles. Pascal’s 16nm FinFET variant is no different. Although by no means cost effective, it is, as the name suggests, titanic in its proportions. A card to beat all others—and in a high-end market with little competition right now, it does exactly that. –zak sTorey
1 Redesigned shroud
Look familiar? It should—this is Nvidia’s latest Pascal polygon pixelpushing cooling solution. With a single fan blower design, the Titan X mimics the GTX 1080 and 1070 Founder’s Edition cards, with a sleek new redesigned cooler, but with one big difference: a sexy black tint to the whole affair. Sleek and quiet, the Titan X should remain insanely cool under load and in your rig.
2 no HBM? no problem.
Although there’s still no hint of HBM 2.0 on any of the flagship cards, the Pascal Titan X comes with a whopping 12GB of GDDR5X on a 384-bit memory bus. By far the biggest we’ve seen, it should allow for an effective memory bandwidth of up to 336.5GB/s, making it ideal for 4K and beyond.
3 3,072
That’s the number of CUDA cores this little beauty has—almost 1,000 more than the top-end GTX 1080. Performance figures aren’t that amazing yet, but this card was made for developers, not gamers. It does suggest what we might get with regard to a GTX 1080 Ti. With driver optimization, it could be a 20–30 percent increase in performance over the GTX 1080.