Some things don’t require a ton of introduction. Like a second Avengers movie or a new Corvette. You pretty much know the deal going in, and the rest is details. When Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang pulled out a Titan X graphics card onstage at GDC, most folks in the room probably knew the deal right away. The Titan X would be the world’s fastest single-GPU graphics card. The rest? Details.

Happily, it’s time to fill in a bunch of those details, since the Titan X is officially making its debut today. You may have already heard that it’s based on a brand-new graphics processor, the plus-sized GM200, which packs pretty much 50% more of everything than the GPU inside the GeForce GTX 980. Perhaps you’ve begun to absorb the fact that the Titan X ships with 12GB of video memory, which is enough to supply the main memory partitions on six GeForce GTX 960 cards—or 3.42857 GeForce GTX 970s. (Nerdiest joke you’ll hear all week, folks. Go ahead and subscribe.)

These details paint a bigger picture whose outlines are already obvious. Let’s fill in a few more and then see exactly how the Titan X performs.

The truly big Maxwell: GM200

The GM200 GPU aboard the Titan X is based on the same Maxwell architecture that we’ve seen in lower-end GeForce cards, and in many ways, it follows the template set by Nvidia in the past. The big version of the new GPU architecture often arrives a little later, but when it does, good things happen on much larger scale.

The GM200—and by extension, the Titan X—differs from past full-sized Nvidia GPUs in one key respect, though. This chip is made almost purely for gaming and graphics; its support for double-precision floating-point math is severely limited. Double-precision calculations happen at only 1/32nd of the single-precision rate.

For gamers, that’s welcome news. I’m happy to see Nvidia committing the resources to build a big chip whose primary mission in life is graphics, and this choice means the GM200 can pack in more resources to help pump out the eye candy. But for those folks wanting to do GPU computing with the Titan X, this news may be rather disappointing. The Titan X will likely still be quite potent for applications that require only single-precision datatypes, but the scope of possible applications will be limited. Folks wanting to do some types of work will have to look elsewhere.

Speaking of geeky details about chips, here’s an intimidating table:

ROP pixels/ clock Texels filtered/ clock (int/fp16) Shader processors Rasterized triangles/ clock Memory interface width (bits) Estimated transistor count (Millions) Die

size (mm²) Fab process GK110 48 240/240 2880 5 384 7100 551 28 nm GM204 64 128/128 2048 4 256 5200 398 28 nm GM200 96 192/192 3072 6 384 8000 601 28 nm Tahiti 32 128/64 2048 2 384 4310 365 28 nm Tonga 32 (48) 128/64 2048 4 256 (384) 5000 359 28 nm Hawaii 64 176/88 2816 4 512 6200 438 28 nm

Like every other chip in the Maxwell family and the ones in the Kepler generation before it, the GM200 is manufactured on a 28-nm fab process. Compared to the GK110 chip that powers older Titans, the GM200 is about 50 square millimeters larger and crams in an additional billion or so transistors.

The block diagram above may be too small to read in any detail, but it will look familiar if you’ve read our past coverage of the Maxwell architecture in our GeForce GTX 750 Ti and GTX 980 reviews. What you see above signifies 50% more of almost everything compared to the GM204 chip that drives the GTX 980. The GM200 has six graphics processing clusters, or GPCs, which are nearly complete GPUs unto themselves. In total, it has 24 shader multiprocessors, or SMs, each of which has quad “cores.” (Nvidia calls them quads and calls ALU slots cores, but that’s just marketing inflation. Somehow 96 “cores” wasn’t impressive enough.) Across the whole chip, the GM200 has a grand total of 3072 shader ALU slots, which we’ve reluctantly agreed to call shader processors.

Compared to the GK110 chip before it, the GM200 has a somewhat different mix of resources. The big Maxwell has twice as many ROPs, which should give it substantially higher pixel throughput and more capacity for the blending work needed for multisampled antialiasing (MSAA). The GM200 also has a few more shader ALU slots and can rasterize one additional triangle per clock cycle. Notably, though, the new Maxwell’s texture filtering capacity is a little lower than its predecessor’s.

These changes aren’t anything too shocking given what we’ve seen from other Maxwell-based GPUs. Thing is, the Maxwell architecture includes a bunch of provisions to make sure it takes better advantage of its resources, and that’s where the real magic is. For instance, the chips’ L2 cache sizes aren’t shown in the table above, but they probably should be. The GM200’s cache is 3MB, double the size of the GK110’s. The added caching may help make up for the deficit in raw texture filtering rates. Also, Maxwell-based chips have a simpler SM structure with more predictable instruction scheduling. That revised arrangement can potentially keep the shader ALUs more consistently occupied. And Maxwell chips can better compress frame buffer data, which means the GM200 should extract effectively more bandwidth from its memory interface, even though it has the same 384-bit width as the GK110’s.

In fact, I’m pretty sure there’s at least one significant new feature built into the Maxwell architecture that Nvidia isn’t telling us about. Maxwell-based GPUs are awfully efficient compared to their Kepler forebears, and I don’t think we know entirely why. We’ll have to defer that discussion for another time.

Nvidia Titans the screws

GPU base clock (MHz) GPU boost clock (MHz) ROP pixels/ clock Texels filtered/ clock Shader pro- cessors Memory path (bits) GDDR5

transfer rate Memory size Peak power draw Intro price GTX

960 1126 1178 32 64 1024 128 7 GT/s 2 GB 120W $199 GTX

970 1050 1178 56 104 1664 224+32 7 GT/s 3.5+0.5GB 145W $329 GTX

980 1126 1216 64 128 2048 256 7 GT/s 4 GB 165W $549 Titan

X 1002 1076 96 192 3072 384 7 GT/s 12 GB 250W $999

The Titan X is by far the most potent member of Nvidia’s revamped GeForce lineup. The GM200 GPU has a base clock of about 1GHz, a little lower than the speeds you’ll see on the GTX 980. The slower clocks are kind of expected from a bigger chip, but the Titan X more than makes up for it by having more of everything else—including a ridiculous 12GB of GDDR5 memory. I don’t think anybody technically needs that much video RAM just yet, but I’m sure Nvidia is happy to sell it at the Titan’s lofty sticker price.

Heck, to my frugal Midwestern mind, the most exciting thing about the Titan is the fact that it portends the release of a slightly cut-down card based on the GM200, likely with 6GB of VRAM, for less money.

Nvidia has equipped the Titan X with its familiar dual-slot aluminum cooler, but this version has been coated with a spiffy matte-black finish. The result is a look similar to a blacked-out muscle car, and I think it’s absolutely bad-ass. Don’t tell the nerds who read my website that I got so excited about paint colors, though, please. Thanks.

Many of the mid-range cards floating around in Damage Labs these days have larger coolers than the Titan X, so it’s kind of impressive what Nvidia has been able to do in a reasonable form factor. The Titan X requires two aux power inputs, one six-pin and one eight-pin, and it draws a peak of 250W total. Nvidia recommends a 600W PSU in order to drive it.

We could revel in even more of the Titan X’s details, but I think you’ve got the picture by now. Let’s see how it handles.

Test notes

This review is the perfect opportunity to debut our new GPU test rigs. We have a pair of GPU rigs in Damage Labs, one for Radeons and the other for GeForces, that allow us to test two graphics cards at once. We’ve updated the core components on these systems to the very best new hardware, so they should fit quite nicely with the Titan X. Have a look:

The major components are:

Intel Core i7-5960X processor

Gigabyte X99-UD5 WiFi motherboard

Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 memory – 16GB

Kingston SSDNow 310 960GB SSD

Corsair AX850 modular power supply

Thermaltake Frio CPU cooler

The CPU-and-mobo combination offers an ideal platform for multi-GPU testing, with tons of PCIe Gen3 lanes up and to four PCIe x16 slots spaced two apart. That’s room for lots of shenanigans.

Speaking of shenanigans, whenever I show a picture of our test systems, people always ask why they include DVD drives. The answer? Mostly so I have place to plug in the extra SATA and power leads that I need when I plug in external drives for imaging. Also, I can install legacy games I own in a pinch. So deal with it.

One place where I didn’t go for the ultra-high-end components in these builds was the SSDs. My concern here wasn’t raw performance—especially since most SATA drives are limited by the interface as much as anything—but capacity. Games keep growing in size, and the 480GB drives in our old test rigs were getting to be cramped.

Thanks to Intel, Gigabyte, Corsair, and Kingston for providing new hardware for our test systems. We’ve already started putting it to good use.

Our testing methods

Most of the numbers you’ll see on the following pages were captured with Fraps, a software tool that can record the rendering time for each frame of animation. We sometimes use a tool called FCAT to capture exactly when each frame was delivered to the display, but that’s usually not necessary in order to get good data with single-GPU setups. We have, however, filtered our Fraps results using a three-frame moving average. This filter should account for the effect of the three-frame submission queue in Direct3D. If you see a frame time spike in our results, it’s likely a delay that would affect when the frame reaches the display.

We didn’t use Fraps with Civ: Beyond Earth or Battlefield 4. Instead, we captured frame times directly from the game engines using the games’ built-in tools. We didn’t use our low-pass filter on those results.

As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Our test systems were configured like so:

Processor Core i7-5960X Motherboard Gigabyte

X99-UD5 WiFi Chipset Intel X99 Memory size 16GB (4 DIMMs) Memory type Corsair

Vengeance LPX

DDR4 SDRAM at 2133 MT/s Memory timings 15-15-15-36

2T Chipset drivers INF update

10.0.20.0 Rapid Storage Technology Enterprise 13.1.0.1058 Audio Integrated

X79/ALC898 with Realtek 6.0.1.7246 drivers Hard drive Kingston

SSDNow 310 960GB SATA Power supply Corsair

AX850 OS Windows

8.1 Pro

Driver

revision GPU

base core clock (MHz) GPU

boost clock (MHz) Memory clock (MHz) Memory size (MB) Asus

Radeon

R9 290X Catalyst 14.12

Omega – 1050 1350 4096 Radeon

R9 295 X2 Catalyst 14.12

Omega – 1018 1250 8192 GeForce

GTX 780 Ti GeForce

347.84 876 928 1750 3072 Gigabyte

GeForce GTX 980 GeForce

347.84 1228 1329 1753 4096 GeForce

Titan X GeForce

347.84 1002 1076 1753 12288

Thanks to Intel, Corsair, Kingston, and Gigabyte for helping to outfit our test rigs with some of the finest hardware available. AMD, Nvidia, and the makers of the various products supplied the graphics cards for testing, as well.

Also, our FCAT video capture and analysis rig has some pretty demanding storage requirements. For it, Corsair has provided four 256GB Neutron SSDs, which we’ve assembled into a RAID 0 array for our primary capture storage device. When that array fills up, we copy the captured videos to our RAID 1 array, comprised of a pair of 4TB Black hard drives provided by WD.

Unless otherwise specified, image quality settings for the graphics cards were left at the control panel defaults. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

The tests and methods we employ are generally publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.

Sizing ’em up

Do the math involving the clock speeds and per-clock potency of the latest high-end graphics cards, and you’ll end up with a comparative table that looks something like this:

Peak pixel fill rate (Gpixels/s) Peak bilinear filtering int8/fp16 (Gtexels/s) Peak rasterization rate (Gtris/s) Peak shader arithmetic rate (tflops) Memory

bandwidth

(GB/s) Asus

R9 290X 67 185/92 4.2 5.9 346 Radeon

R9 295 X2 130 358/179 8.1 11.3 640 GeForce GTX

780 Ti 45 223/223 4.6 5.3 336 Gigabyte

GTX 980 85 170/170 5.3 5.4 224 GeForce

Titan X 103 206/206 6.5 6.6 336

We’ve shown you tables like that many times in the past, but frankly, the tools we’ve had to test delivered performance in these key rates haven’t been all that spectacular. That ends today, since we have a new revision of the Beyond3D graphics architecture test suite that measures these things much more accurately. These are directed tests aimed at particular GPU features, so their results won’t translate exactly into in-game performance. They can, however, shed some light on the respective strengths and weaknesses of the GPU silicon.

Nvidia has commited a ton of resources to pixel fill and blending in its Maxwell chips, as you can see. The mid-range GTX 980 surpasses even AMD’s high-end Radeon R9 290X on this front, and the Titan X adds even more pixel throughput. This huge capacity for pixel-pushing should make the Titan X ready to thrive in this era of high-PPI displays.

This test cleverly allows us to measure the impact of the frame-buffer compression capabilities built into modern GPUs. The random texture used isn’t compressible, while the black texture should be easily compressed. The results back up Nvidia’s claims that it’s had some compression for several generations, but the form of compression built into Maxwell is substantially more effective. Thus, the Titan X achieves effective transfer rates higher than its theoretical peak memory bandwidth.

The reason we don’t see any compression benefits on AMD’s R9 290X is because we’re hitting the limits of the Hawaii chip’s ROPs in this test. We may have to tweak this test in the future in order to get a sense of the degree of compression happening in recent Radeons.

’tis a little jarring to see how closely the measured texture filtering rates from these GPUs match their theoretical peaks. These tools are way better than anything we’ve seen before.

Since the Fermi generation, Nvidia’s GPU architectures have held a consistent and often pronounced lead in geometry throughput. That trend continues with Maxwell, although the GM200’s capabilities on this front haven’t grown as much as in other areas.

I’m not quite sure what’s up with the polygon throughput test. The delivered results are higher than the theoretical peak rasterization rates for the GeForce cards. I have a few speculative thoughts, though. One, the fact that the GTX 980 outperforms the Titan X suggests this test is somehow gated by GPU clock speeds. Two, the fact that we’re exceeding the theoretical rate suggests perhaps the GPU clocks are ranging higher via GPU Boost. The “boost” clock on these GeForce cards, on which we’ve based the numbers in the table above, is more of a typical operating speed, not an absolute peak. Three, I really need to tile my bathroom floor, but we’ll defer that for later.

The first of the three ALU tests above is something we’ve wanted for a while: a solid test of peak arithmetic throughput. As you can see, the GM200 pretty much sticks the landing here, turning in just as many teraflops as one would expect based on its specs. The GTX 980 and R9 290X do the same, while the Kepler-based GTX 780 Ti is somewhat less efficient, even in this straightforward test case.

I have to say that, although the GM200 is putting on a nice show, that big shader array on AMD’s Hawaii chip continues to impress. Seems like no matter how you measure the performance of a GCN shader array, you’ll find strengths rather than weaknesses.

Now, let’s see how all of this voodoo translates into actual gaming performance.

Far Cry 4





Click the buttons above to cycle through the plots. Each card’s frame times are from one of the three test runs we conducted for that card.

Right away, the Titan X’s plot looks pristine, with very few frame time spikes and a relatively steady cadence of new frames.

Click over to the plot for the Radeon R9 295 X2, though. That’s the Titan X’s closest competition from the Radeon camp, a Crossfire-on-a-stick monster with dual Hawaii GPUs and water cooling. In the first part of the run, the frame time plots are much more variable than on the Titan X. That’s true even though we’re measuring with Fraps, early in the frame production pipeline, not at the display using FCAT. (I’d generally prefer to test multi-GPU solutions with both Fraps and FCAT, given that they sometimes have problems with smooth frame dispatch and delivery. I just haven’t been able to get FCAT working at 4K resolutions.) AMD’s frame-pacing for CrossFire could possibly smooth the delivery of frames to the display beyond what we see in Fraps, but big timing disruptions in the frame creation process like we’re seeing above are difficult to mask (especially since we’re using a three-frame moving average to filter the Fraps data).

Then look what happens later in the test session: frame times become even more variable. This is no fluke. It happens in each test run in pretty much the same way.

Note that we used a new Catalyst beta driver supplied directly by AMD for the R9 295 X2 in Far Cry 4. The current Catalyst Omega driver doesn’t support multi-GPU in this game. That said, my notes from this test session pretty much back up what the Fraps results tell us. “New driver is ~50 FPS. Better than before, but seriously doesn’t feel like 50 FPS on a single GPU.”

Sorry to take the spotlight off of the Titan X, but it’s worth noting what the new GeForce has to contend with. The Radeon R9 295 X2 is capable of producing some very high FPS averages, but the gaming experience it delivers doesn’t always track with the traditional benchmark scores.

The gap between the FPS average and the 99th percentile frame time tells the story of the Titan X’s smoothness and the R9 295 X2’s stutter.

We can understand in-game animation fluidity even better by looking at the “tail” of the frame time distribution for each card, which illustrates what happens in the most difficult frames.

The 295 X2 produces 50-60% of the frames in our test sequence much quicker than anything else. That changes as the proportion of frames rendered rises, though, and once we hit 85%, the 295 X2’s frame times actually cross over and exceed the frame times from the single Hawaii GPU aboard the R9 290X. By contrast, the Titan X’s curve is low and flat.





These “time spent beyond X” graphs are meant to show “badness,” those instances where animation may be less than fluid—or at least less than perfect. The 50-ms threshold is the most notable one, since it corresponds to a 20-FPS average. We figure if you’re not rendering any faster than 20 FPS, even for a moment, then the user is likely to perceive a slowdown. 33 ms correlates to 30 FPS or a 30Hz refresh rate. Go beyond that with vsync on, and you’re into the bad voodoo of quantization slowdowns. And 16.7 ms correlates to 60 FPS, that golden mark that we’d like to achieve (or surpass) for each and every frame.

One interesting quirk of this test is demonstrated in the 33-ms results. The GeForce GTX 980 produces almost every single frame in less than 33.3 milliseconds, nearly matching the Titan X. While playing, the difference in the smoothness of animation between the two cards isn’t terribly dramatic.

Meanwhile, the GeForce GTX 780 Ti suffers by comparison to the GTX 980 and the R9 290X. I suspect that’s because its 3GB of video memory isn’t quite sufficient for this test scenario.

Alien: Isolation





After all of the drama on the last page, it’s a relief to see all of the cards behaving well here. What’s remarkable is how well each GPU performs given the quality of the visuals produced by this game. My notes for the R9 295 X2 say: “Isolation isn’t bad, maybe one or two tiny hits. But also isn’t bad with one GPU.”





Click the middle button above, and you’ll see that none of these graphics cards GPU spends any time above the 33-ms threshold.

Civilization: Beyond Earth

Since this game’s built-in benchmark simply spits out frame times, we were able to give it a full workup without having to resort to manual testing. That’s nice, since manual benchmarking of an RTS with zoom is kind of a nightmare.

Oh, and the Radeons were tested with the Mantle API instead of Direct3D. Only seemed fair, since the game supports it.





Check out those smooth frame time plots for the Radeons with Mantle. All of these graphics cards handle this game well in 4K, but the Radeons are just a notch better. As evidence of that fact, notice that the R9 295 X2 trails the Titan X in the FPS average but is quicker at the 99th percentile frame time mark. This outcome is the result of intentional engineering work by AMD and Firaxis. They chose to use split-frame rendering to divvy up the load between the GPUs. Thus, they say:

In this way the game will feel very smooth and responsive, because raw frame-rate scaling was not the goal of this title. Smooth, playable performance was the goal. This is one of the unique approaches to mGPU that AMD has been extolling in the era of Mantle and other similar APIs.

I expect to see game developers and GPU makers making this choice more often in games based on DirectX 12 and Vulkan. Thank goodness.

Note that AMD has taken a bit of a hit by choosing to do the right thing with regard to multi-GPU scaling here. The curve above tells the story. With SFR load balancing, two Hawaii GPUs perform almost identically to a single Titan X across the entire tail of the frame time distribution. SFR doesn’t inflate benchmark scores like AFR does, so it leads to a more honest assessment of a multi-GPU solution’s potential.





Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor





This whole test is pretty much a testament to the Titan X’s massive memory capacity. I used the “Ultra” texture quality settings in Shadow of Mordor, which the game recommends only if you have 6GB of video memory or more . And I tested at 4K with everything else cranked. As you can see from the frame time plots and the 99th percentile results, the Titan X handled this setup without issue. Nearly everything else suffered.





With 4GB of RAM onboard, the R9 290X and GTX 980 handled this scenario similarly, with occasional frame time spikes but general competence. With only 3GB, the GTX 780 Ti couldn’t quite keep it together.

Meanwhile, although the R9 295 X2 has 8GB of onboard memory, 4GB per GPU, it suffers because AFR load-balancing has some memory overhead. Effectively, the 295 X2 has less total memory on tap than the R9 290X. Thus, the 295 X2 really struggles here. My notes say: “Super-slow ~7 FPS when starting game. Occasional slowdowns during, should show up in Fraps. Slow on enemy kill sequences. Super-slow in menus. Unacceptable.” The fix, of course, is to turn down the texture quality, but that is a compromise required by the 295 X2 that the 290X might be able to avoid. And the Titan X laughs.

Battlefield 4

We tested BF4 on the Radeons using the Mantle API, since it was available.









Here’s another case where a game uses Mantle on the R9 295 X2 and performs nicely in all of our metrics, with a relatively smooth and sensible frame time distribution. Remarkably, this is also another case where the R9 295 X2’s performance matches that of the Titan X almost exactly. Seriously, look at those curves. There’s much to be said about the virtues of a single, big GPU.

Crysis 3









My notes for this game on the R9 295 X2 say: “Seems good generally, but occasional hiccups that take a while.” Take a look at the frame time plots, and you’ll see that I nailed it. By contrast, the Titan avoids those big hiccups while also keeping frame times low overall. That reality is best reflected in the “badness” metrics at 33 and 50 ms.

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel





This game uses ye olde DirectX 9 to access the GPU, and AMD doesn’t support CrossFire in DX9 on the R9 295 X2. As a result, the 295 X2 is a little slower than the R9 290X here, due to its slightly lower clock speeds and differing thermal constraints. The weird oscillating pattern you’re seeing in the frame time plots for the Radeons is an old issue with Borderlands games that AMD fixed with its Catalyst 13.2 drivers and apparently needs to fix again.





Despite that oscillating pattern, the Radeons spend almost no time above the 33-ms threshold. That’s good. Better is the Titan X, which spends very little time above the 16.7-ms threshold. It’s almost capable of a “perfect” 60 FPS in this game at 4K.

Power consumption

Please note that our “under load” tests aren’t conducted in an absolute peak scenario. Instead, we have the cards running a real game, Crysis 3, in order to show us power draw with a more typical workload.

The Titan X more or less holds the line on power consumption compared to the GTX 780 Ti. You know from the preceding pages that its performance is substantially higher, though, and it’s supporting 12GB worth of memory on lots of DRAM chips. So… yeah. Wow.

Speaking of “wow,” have a look at the power draw on the R9 295 X2. Good grief.

Noise levels and GPU temperatures

These video card coolers are so good, they’re causing us testing problems. You see, the noise floor in Damage Labs is about 35-36 dBA. It varies depending on things I can’t quite pinpoint, but one notable contributor is the noise produced by the lone cooling fan always spinning on our test rig, the 120-mm fan on the CPU cooler. Anyhow, what you need to know is that any of the noise results that range below 36 dBA are running into the limits of what we can test accurately. Don’t make too much of differences below that level.

Two of the cards above, the GTX 980 an the R9 290X, have custom, non-reference coolers that sport more fans and larger surface areas than Nvidia’s stock offering. As a result, those two cards are quieter under load than the Titan X. The Titan X is no slouch, though. All of these cards are reasonably quiet.

Of course, the biggest cooler here belongs to the Radeon R9 295 X2, but its integrated liquid cooler with separate radiator has an awful lot of heat to dissipate.

Conclusions

As usual, we’ll sum up our test results with a couple of value scatter plots. The best values tend toward the upper left corner of each plot, where performance is highest and prices are lowest. We’ve converted our 99th-percentile frame time results into FPS, so that higher is better, in order to make this work.





The Titan X is outright faster than everything we tested, including the Radeon R9 295 X2, in our frame-time-sensitive 99th-percentile results. That tracks with my subjective experiences, as I’ve detailed in the preceding pages. The R9 295 X2 has more total GPU power, as the FPS average indicates, but that power doesn’t cleanly translate into smoother gaming. In fact, the results we saw from Beyond Earth and BF4 suggest that the Radeon R9 295 X2’s true potential for smooth gaming pretty closely matches the Titan X’s. Unfortunately, the situation in most games is worse than that for the Radeon.

Heck, as a gamer, if you gave me a choice of an R9 295 X2 or an R9 290X, free of charge, I’d pick the R9 290X. The 290X is a good product, even if it’s a bit behind the curve right now. The 295 X2 is not in a good state.

Here’s the other part of the picture. The Titan X offers a considerable improvement in performance over the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, yet its system-level power draw is about the same—and it’s lower than the Radeon R9 290X’s. Without the benefit of a new chip fabrication process, Nvidia has produced an honest generational improvement in GPU efficiency from Kepler to Maxwell. The Titan X puts a big, fat exclamation mark on that fact. If you want the ultimate in gaming power, and if you’re willing and able to fork over a grand for the privilege, there’s no denying that the Titan X is the card to choose.

For those of us with slightly more modest means, I expect Nvidia will offer a slimmed-down version of the GM200 with 6GB of GDDR5 in a new card before long. Rumors are calling it the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, but I dunno what the name will be. Value-conscious buyers might want to wait for that product. But what do they know?

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