Nvidia Corp. claimed a big advance in the videogame graphics race along with a substantial price break.

The Silicon Valley chip company on Friday unveiled a graphics processing unit that it said is twice as fast as its current flagship chip—now sold in a $1,000 add-in card for personal computers dubbed Titan X—while consuming one third of the electrical power of that product. The new GTX 1080 chip will be available May 27 in cards with a suggested retail price of $599, the company said.

Nvidia’s new offering is the consumer version of a technology that the company first disclosed in April, starting with a card for server systems aimed at artificial intelligence and other applications.

Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang, who unveiled the GTX 1080 at an event Friday night in Austin, Tex., called it the culmination of three years of work and “billions of dollars” of research and development. He described its technical benefits as almost unbelievable.

“The 1080 is insane,” Mr. Huang said. “It is almost an irresponsible amount of performance.”