Last night’s announcement of the Nvidia Shield game console (or smart TV device, or streaming player, depending on your preference) was major news, but left the company conspicuously light on announcements of new PC hardware. Loyalists worried they’d been left behind, but it turns out they had nothing to fear.
Nvidia’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, appeared at the Epic Games keynote to tease an upcoming GeForce GTX Titan X graphics card. He revealed the card, which looks a lot like the old Titan Z, but is clad in black rather than silver. It was then used to run Unreal Engine 4’s jaw-dropping new “Kite” demo.
Only two specifications were officially announced; the card will offer 12GB of RAM, and it will contain eight billion transistors. The RAM figure is not an increase over the Titan Z, but to be honest, that card’s available memory was overkill for gaming. Huang also said the card will contain over eight billion transistors.
While nothing else has been officially stated, the remaining specifications aren’t difficult to guess. The Titan Z was basically two GTX 780 chips rolled into one package, so the Titan X will likely be two GTX 980s in a blanket. It’ll probably have over 4,000 CUDA cores clocked at slightly lower speeds than a standard GTX 980. The memory interface will be 256-bit, a step back from the Titan Z’s 384-bit interface, but Nvidia made a similar move with its 900-series cards with no apparent ill effects (the GTX 970’s woes are unrelated).
Related: GTX 970 problems lead to class-action lawsuit
In short, the GTX Titan X will be the quickest video card on the market. Provided, of course, that it comes to market soon, and that’s still an open question. Nvidia hasn’t leaked the pricing or release date of the X.
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