Companies often play coy with announcements at major press events, but Nvidia’s latest tactic with its new GTX Titan X may take some kind of reward. The company’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, made a surprise appearance at an Unreal Engine conference and handed Unreal chief developer Tim Sweeney an autographed GPU. This new Titan X will carry an estimated eight billion transistors and a massive 12GB of RAM. But Nvidia isn’t saying more until its own GTC event.

According to Sweeney, Titan X was developed partly in response to the VR headsets and technology that are widely on display. In more plausible reality, it’s a chip in the same vein as the original GTX Titan and GTX 780 — an HPC and scientific computing GPU that Nvidia is bringing over to the consumer business.

Previous rumors have suggested that the GM200 has a 384-bit memory bus (up from 256-bits on the GTX 900 family) with 12GB of RAM (so that checks out), 96 ROPS, and either 192 or 256 texture mapping units (TMUs). Total core count on the die is rumored to be 3072, up from the current 2048. Treat all these figures with a grain of salt — they could be inaccurate, or they could reflect the entire chip (NV might fuse off sections of the die to improve yields).

It’ll be interesting to see how Nvidia prices this card, given the lack of competition from AMD. The GTX 780 and 780 Ti both took sharp price cuts after AMD launched the R9 290 and 290X, but the dual-core GPU Titan Z was much more expensive than either the R9 295X2 or even two Titan Black’s in SLI. Even evaluated as luxury products, the later cards didn’t quite have the panache of their progenitor.

IF Nvidia does trim the die, it’ll have to contend with concerns over how the GPU’s memory controller and L2 cache are impacted. The full implementation is rumored to have 24 SMM blocks, but if the chip uses a lower figure, it could end up with the same bifurcated path to memory as the GTX 970. While I’ve maintained that the GTX 970 remains an excellent card in the vast majority of use cases, a vocal minority of owners have been extremely unhappy over what they allege amounts to false advertising.

We’ll have to wait a little while longer to find out if Titan X will sweep the field, but any uprated GTX 980 is going to be a potent solution. As of this writing, AMD has made no comments regarding any competitive moves it might make in response.