A couple of weeks ago, NVIDIA surprisingly announced the new TITAN X graphics card, beefed up with the new Pascal architecture featuring a GP102 GPU based on a 16nm FinFET fab process. NVIDIA used the same name as the previous TITAN X (Maxwell), not sure if they can’t find any better name than “TITAN X”, but “TITAN P” or “XP” doesn’t sound like the fastest and most powerful graphics card around. Performance is not the only thing that is “significantly” increased on the new TITAN X Pascall, but its priced also increase from the previous TITAN X which is $1000, now to $1200 for the TITAN X Pascal. But just how fast is the new TITAN X Pascal? Is it worth it (to buy one) for gaming? Can it play graphics intensive games at 4K resolution with 60fps average? Well, the TITAN X reviews are out and by now we have a better idea what this new graphics card has to offer.
NVIDIA TITAN X Features and Specs
The NVIDIA TITAN X Pascal is currently the company’s flagship graphics card and is the fastest single GPU solution on the planet. Unfortunately for the 1080 owners, the GTX 1080’s title of being the fastest GPU on the planet didn’t last long enough, and was quickly replaced by the TITAN X in a matter of 2 months or so. But it is worthy to mention that the TITAN X is priced $500/$600 more than the GTX 1080, and it’s not really geared towards the major consumers unlike the GeForce GTX 10 series graphics cards.
The new TITAN X Pascal features the same blower cooler design we saw on the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, and with the same angular shroud and backplate; but it comes with a nice and sexier all-black finish. Under the hood the Titan X Pascal features 3584 CUDA cores, 224 Texture units, 96 ROPs and is capable of up to 11 TFLOP of compute performance. It has a GPU clock speed of 1418MHz and a memory clock speed of 1251MHz. You can check out the rest of the specifications from the table below.
| Specs | TITAN X Pascal | TITAN X Maxwell | GTX 1080 | GTX 1070 | GTX 1060 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPU | 16nm FinFET GP102 | 28nm GM200-400 | 16nm GP104-400 | 16nm GP104-200 | 16nm GP106-400 |
| Transistors | 12 Billion | 8 Billion | 7.2 Billion | 7.2 Billion | 4.4 Billions |
| TMUs | 224 | 192 | 160 | 120 | 80 |
| ROPs | 96 | 96 | 64 | 64 | 48 |
| CUDA Cores | 3584 | 3072 | 2560 | 1920 | 1280 |
| Base Clock | 1417 MHz | 1000 MHz | 1607 MHz | 1506 MHz | 1506 MHz |
| Boost Clock | 1531 MHz | 1089 MHz | 1733 MHz | 1683 MHz | 1708 MHz |
| Max F32 Compute Performance | 11 TFLOPs | 6.69 TFLOPs | 8.2 TFLOPs | 5.7 TFLOPs | 3.9 TFLOPs |
| Memory Speed | 10 Gbps | 7 Gbps | 10 Gbps | 8.0 Gbps | 8.0 Gbps |
| Standard Memory Config | 12 GB GDDR5X | 12 GB GDDR5 | 8 GB GDDR5X | 8 GB GDDR5 | 6 GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Interface Width | 384-bit | 384-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 192-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 480 GB/s | 336.5 GB/s | 320 GB/s | 256 GB/s | 192 GB/s |
| Graphics Card Power | 250W | 250W | 180W | 150W | 120W |
| Max Digital Resolution | 7680x4320 @60Hz | 5120x3200 @60Hz | 7680x4320 @60Hz | 7680x4320 @60Hz | 7680x4320 @60Hz |
| Standard Display Connectors | DP 1.4, HDMI 2.0b, Dual Link-DVI | Dual Link DVI-I, HDMI 2.0, 3x DisplayPort 1.2 | DP 1.4, HDMI 2.0b, Dual Link-DVI | DP 1.4, HDMI 2.0b, Dual Link-DVI | DP 1.4, HDMI 2.0b, Dual Link-DVI |
| Power Connectors | 6+8-pin | 6+8-pin | 8-pin | 8-pin | 6-pin |
| Price (At Launch) | $1,200 | $1,000 | $599 / $699 | $379 / $449 | $249 / $299 |
With all of the TITAN X’s numbers mentioned, how does this translate to performance? Just how fast the new TITAN X is? Unfortunately, we don’t have a TITAN X on hand to do our own benchmarking. But I would like to show you some of the benchmarks from other tech sites below.
Obviously, the TITAN X is geared towards higher resolution gaming like 1440p and 4K. The TITAN X is simply an overkill for 1080p gaming and I don’t find any reason why you should even consider getting one if you simply game at 1080p resolution. Check out the results below.
NVIDIA TITAN X Benchmarks
For the full review visit their respective pages:
NVIDIA TITAN X Review at Guru3D
NVIDIA TITAN X Review at HotHardware
NVIDIA TITAN X Pascal 12GB Review at TechPowerUp
Should You Buy the new TITAN X Pascal Graphics Card?
No doubt that the new NVIDIA TITAN X Pascal is the fastest graphics card on the planet. It’s also a very expensive solution. The TITAN lineup has never been an affordable graphics card, not even close to being “reasonably” priced. It’s not primarily targeted for regular consumers; but content creators or game developers would benefit from it more. Also if you are gaming at 1080p it’s better for you to get a GTX 1060 or GTX 1070 instead. For 4K gamers, if you want the fastest single GPU solution today, and you have the money to spend on it, then the TITAN X is your solution. But if you can still wait a little bit longer, most probably something in between the GTX 1080 and TITAN X ( like a GTX 1080 Ti) would be released in the following months to come and it would offer a better and more reasonable price to performance ratio.
