NVIDIA Launches The GeForce GTX TITAN X, Linux Tests Coming

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Launches The GeForce GTX TITAN X, Linux Tests Coming

NVIDIA officially announced the GeForce GTX Titan X $1000 USD graphics card today to kick off their 2015 GPU Technology Conference...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-TITAN-X-Linux-Coming

[Bbox]

That's a transistor for every human. And then some. They seem to be cheap these days.

[Saverios]

They seem to be cheap these days.

What, transistors or humans?

[mcirsta]

Nvidia thousand launches

It seems everything is 1000 for this card, the clock, the price ....

[belal1]

12GB!!!!!!!!

12GB of VRAM? I'm baffled as to why pack so much for a consumer grade card? I understand some games may require up to 3GB of vram nowadays, but 12GB is just overkill for any game. Someone please explain if it's not.

[Daktyl198]

12GB of VRAM? I'm baffled as to why pack so much for a consumer grade card? I understand some games may require up to 3GB of vram nowadays, but 12GB is just overkill for any game. Someone please explain if it's not.

Is the titan a consumer-grade card though? I thought consumer cards only went up to ~$700 or so. This is more of a general "parallel powerhouse" card that I could see being used in CAD/etc (especially with that high CUDA count), in which case, the memory might be justified?

[dragorth]

12GB of VRAM? I'm baffled as to why pack so much for a consumer grade card? I understand some games may require up to 3GB of vram nowadays, but 12GB is just overkill for any game. Someone please explain if it's not.

This current generation of games may only be using 3GB of vram, but the next generation will be able to utilize more. Keep in mind, the GPU vendors are betting heavily on 4k UHD sizes, and the latest thing from UHD appears to be so called High Dynamic Range Displays. This requires both more bandwidth, and will require more memory for when the textures themselves will be 8bit (you thought they were already? Ha ha.) to 12bit or if some parties get their way even 16bit displays and tvs.

Now, keep in mind, that 4k displays are already maxing out the 4GB on todays video cards, then add in this exponential growth in texture sizes, and, well, 12GB may not be enough.

Also, lets not forget, that the Titan served a dual purpose. In the high end 3D industry, freelancers will often buy two gaming cards rather than spend 4k on a Workstation card. This gives them something significantly cheaper, with many of the advantages of the Workstation card, and the ability to spend more money for dual or even quad later on. These are all good things in Nvidia's view.

[kaprikawn]

12GB of VRAM? I'm baffled as to why pack so much for a consumer grade card? I understand some games may require up to 3GB of vram nowadays, but 12GB is just overkill for any game. Someone please explain if it's not.

The highest quality textures on Shadow of Mordor requires a 6GB card. And this, as a premium card only covers that by a factor of two. 12GB not a crazy amount if you ask me.

[schmidtbag]

That was nice of nvidia to send over such a valuable piece of hardware.

12GB of VRAM? I'm baffled as to why pack so much for a consumer grade card?

For $1000 it better come with an unreasonable amount of everything.

[efikkan]

12GB of VRAM? I'm baffled as to why pack so much for a consumer grade card? I understand some games may require up to 3GB of vram nowadays, but 12GB is just overkill for any game. Someone please explain if it's not.

Well it's not a consumer card. Titan is intended for semi-pro users, who do compute, rendering and development. Previous Titan cards offered high DP performance and lots of memory, but unfortunately this version only offers more memory.

This current generation of games may only be using 3GB of vram, but the next generation will be able to utilize more. Keep in mind, the GPU vendors are betting heavily on 4k UHD sizes, and the latest thing from UHD appears to be so called High Dynamic Range Displays. This requires both more bandwidth, and will require more memory for when the textures themselves will be 8bit (you thought they were already? Ha ha.) to 12bit or if some parties get their way even 16bit displays and tvs.

Now, keep in mind, that 4k displays are already maxing out the 4GB on todays video cards, then add in this exponential growth in texture sizes, and, well, 12GB may not be enough.

Also, lets not forget, that the Titan served a dual purpose. In the high end 3D industry, freelancers will often buy two gaming cards rather than spend 4k on a Workstation card. This gives them something significantly cheaper, with many of the advantages of the Workstation card, and the ability to spend more money for dual or even quad later on. These are all good things in Nvidia's view.

Titan X have basically the same bandwidth as 780Ti with 3 GB. Even though games running at high resolutions with AA and high details easily could consume lots of memory, they will still be bottlenecked by the memory bandwidth. No game can use close to 12 GB in a single frame and maintain a good frame rate (do the math). Some games which uses "megatextures" will thrive with loads of memory, but unfortunately there are like one game or so. Things will start getting interesting next year with Pascal using HBM memory (and AMD later this year).

As a developer myself, I would strongly consider buying one of these Titans. EVGA got a Superclocked version with 12% higher performance for only $30 extra.