NVIDIA's Titan X - the latest drool-worthy GPU out of NVIDIA

NVIDIA surprised visitors to Epic Games’ GDC session this morning by announcing their latest monster GPU, the Titan X.

While details are still scarce—NVIDIA has their own conference in a few weeks, where we are assured to hear more—the Titan X is based on NVIDIA’s new Maxwell architecture, packs 12 gigabytes of VRAM, and is crammed with more than 8 billion transistors. That’s a billion more than last year’s Titan Z.

With NVIDIA’s conference just around the corner, the announcement might have surprised some, but there’s good reason for it. The Titan X powers an ambitious VR experience called Thief in the Shadows, which is a collaboration between Epic Games, Oculus and Weta Digital that puts gamers in the role of someone exploring Smaug’s (the dragon from The Hobbit) treasure filled cave.[image:blog_post:56030]

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The announcement was pretty dramatic. Epic’s Founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said that the VR experience in Theif in the Shadows is so powerful that it requires a new graphics solution with unprecedented capabilities that aren’t currently available. “Does anyone have any ideas how we can do this?” he asked the crowd.[image:blog_post:56029]

A moment of silence. Fidgeting. Then, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang emerged from the back of the room, saying he had one. He then unwrapped a box artfully labeled TITAN X, thus unveiling the company’s new top-end GPU.

Stay tuned for more information about the Titan X. While it was developed with gamers in mind, it will no doubt be powering more than a few production towers through their renders.

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Russ Fairley is a producer, editor and motion graphic designer. He also writes for Videomaker and several other publications.