Gadgetory

hey everyone we are at gtc 2015 or the GPU technology conference as put on by Nvidia and today Nvidia just unveiled in official capacity their Titan X video card this is a one-thousand-dollar video card that is intended for single GPU gaming solutions at high resolutions and the card was originally teased at GDC 2015 which was about a week or two ago and here we have the full specifications the price we have benchmarks forthcoming as soon as this event ends and it's it's pretty interesting for a high-end flagship card especially a Titan one and we'll go over that momentarily so while I'm talking here I'll splice in some b-roll from the show floor just you can check it out but the the main items with the Titan X going over all the hard specs are that it's got 3072 cuda cores that's about a thousand more than the GTX 980 which had 2048 on the GM to a4 chip and the Titan X is using a GM 200 ships so this is the new iteration of a maxwell chip it is still using maxwell it's also operating at 192 Gigot axles per second for the texture filter rate which is a technology I described on the YouTube channel previously you can search the channel for texture filter rate for that information and it's got a 330 6.5 gigabyte per second memory bandwidth so this memory bandwidth is actually the same or very close to the 780 Ti which was released a generation ago and it's much higher than the GTX 980 the reason for this in large part is because nvidia has largely changed their architecture between Kepler and Maxwell Maxwell's cuda cores are about forty percent more efficient in terms of power per watt or performance per watt I should say than Kepler so Maxwell forty percent more efficient than Kepler that's very important to note because when comparing things like coup de coeur counts it's not a linear comparison between the two architectures with that noted there are more ROPS and TM use on the GTX Titan X than previously on the 980 it's got 12 gigabytes of video memory and this is a single bank effectively of twelve gigabytes some video cards will advertise 12 or 16 gig of ram but it's actually two banks of six or two banks of eight and either of those cases and that's because those video cards have two GPUs on a single card so it's a to GPU single card solution in those instances in the case of the Titan X it is a single GPU single card solution using the GM 200 chip and it's got all 12 gigabytes of memory reserved for that single chip the main benefit of having so much memory and such a large memory interface which is 384 bits in this instance with that 300 plus gigabyte per second memory bandwidth is high resolutions and pushing more pixels so when you push more pixels what you what I'm really talking about is running at a 4k resolution or multiple monitors at a similarly high resolution and the Titan acts is advertised by Nvidia as being a high-end solution for 4k gaming that can actually play games with a single GPU at 40 FPS or better in some instances and I'll go over those benchmarks momentarily you can see them on the screen now earlier I said that the Titan X is a little interesting and the reason for this is because the Titan line has traditionally been targeted at researchers and scientists and people doing simulations it's not quite the same market as a quadro card for the the Titans II for instance but the Titans II was pushed as a high-end very expensive research solution and it's fully double precision enabled the Titan X which is the new one don't get the mixed up is not fully double precision enabled it is actually 1 30 seconds the throughput of a single precision for DP on the Titan X and it's got seven teraflops of single precision performance so the Titan X is not being pushed as a research card it is being pushed at a gaming and media production card people who do media production like we do accept that a higher quality not in a hotel room on YouTube will benefit from something like a tight next because it is a semi affordable at a thousand dollars solution that's got a lot of processing power cuda cores 422 enabled applications like adobe premiere the technology of the titan x is effectively the same as what premiered on the gtx 980 and previous maxwell chips so it's supporting mfa which is Nvidia's multiframe sampled anti-aliasing alternative to MSAA it's a bit more efficient and produces effectively the same visual result it's got vxg I or voxel global illumination as they call it support for their time warp technology for virtual reality and all that stuff nothing has changed on this front so you can check our GTX 980 review for that technology if you're unfamiliar with any of it the Titan X is marketed as being an overclocking solution as well the TDP of the base Titan X is 250 watts it runs at about a thousand megahertz base clock so a bit lower base clock than the GTX 980 thousand seventy five megahertz boost clock much lower boost clock from the GTX 980 and it's at 250 watts that's a hundred percent of the the power target percentage if you increase it by ten percent which you can do in Maxwell overclocking I've got a video on that also on the channel increase by ten percent now your your max TDP is about 275 wats so that does give some room for play if you're an overclocker and video reports that internally they were able to push about 1.4 gigahertz for the clock they didn't specify boost or base that is almost definitely the boost clock that's just how these over clocks are measured especially when they're that high so it is a capable card for overclocking in theory but ultimately the question here is whether this card is meant for you and we are reviewing this card it was shipped we're getting it after gtc unfortunately so I don't have the benchmarks today other sites do go check them out see if you're you're interested in it but here's the thing regardless of the benchmarks the GTX Titan X is one thousand dollars it's a single GPU solution that performs very well for things like 4k according to the internal benchmarks I've read so far but if you're on 1080 or 1440 there's no reason you should buy this video card maybe if you're planning to upgrade in the future but if you're planning it up in the future then our general philosophy on the website is that you should make all the purchases at once and just save it up because we don't know how technology will change in the next year or two the Titan X is an impressive technological feat it's got a lot of cores packed into the same space it has a nice looking finish with the aluminum chassis and all matte black paint I do I am partial to the previous color of the 780 Ti in the 980 but the Titan X is a nice mix up but for gaming that's a bit much there are very few instances where you will need a card like this to play games and even in 4k not many games are optimized for 4k yet and I don't just mean performance I mean visually because if you look at the user interface and games when you when you run them in 4k it's sort of like forcing it the interface will have very tiny font and very tiny you I because the developers and this is on the developer side more than on the technology hardware side the developers just haven't built for you because not enough people are playing for K that will change in the future probably going forward but it's something to know it's it's worth noting just like with SLI when that was new it was worth noting that you'd be disabling one card fifty percent of the time or more because developers had an optimized for it so same instance here with 4k except it's visual at the end of the day if you're a media production professional it is definitely worth looking into the Titan acts if you're a gamer on the enthusiast side sure look into it if you're a gamer who is just playing games and not necessarily overclocking and you don't consider yourself an enthusiast you don't need the newest thing probably buy something more affordable unless you've just got so much money burning a hole through your pocket that you you need to get rid of a thousand dollars that's not to say it's a bad card it's just to say that for gaming intentions at lower than 4k resolution there's not much justification for a thousand dollar purchase right now especially with the 980 doing as well as does and with even AMD's 290x performing pretty well with high resolution gaming at a much more affordable price so that's sort of the roundup of all the information check out some benchmarks online check ours when they're up next week we'll have some pretty unique benchmarks that others probably won't be producing immediately so do stay tuned for all of that and then you can find out if it's a good card for your needs still cool technology it will have more technology and other cool stuff for you coming out gtc 2015 here this week stay tuned to the channel for more and i will see you all next time you