Nvidia Announces The GTX Titan X; Features Maxwell, 8 Billion Transistors

Today at a session on the Unreal Engine at GDC, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney was casually talking about the need for more power for photo realism, especially virtual reality, when he was interrupted by a sudden thud from the back of the room. It was Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang who surprised everyone by announcing the Titan X.

At this time, not much is known about the Titan X, mainly because this is nothing more than a pre-announcement. Among the details revealed is that the card took several thousand man-hours to create, is based on the latest Maxwell architecture, and that it packs a staggering 8 billion transistors. It also features a jaw-dropping 12 GB frame buffer -- impressive for a single-GPU graphics card.

For comparison, Nvidia's most powerful single-GPU Maxwell graphics card that you can buy today, the GTX 980, has 5.2 billion transistors, so that should give you a good idea about just how powerful this card may be.

The card is built using the same NVTTM cooler as earlier cards from Nvidia, but with a couple of changes. Among these changes appear to be a black design, an LED-lit text saying "TITAN," and a green LED in the fan. Naturally, we can probably also expect it to have a green LED-lit "GeForce" text on the side of the cooler.

At the press conference, Epic also showed off a demo of the Titan X running a new demo of Unreal Engine 4, which you can see above.

Nvidia did not announce when we would be hearing more about the card, when it would be available, what it would cost, or any further juicy technical details, but with GTC (GPU Tech Conf.) around the corner, something tells us we will be hearing more in just under two weeks time.

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