What is the Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X?
The Titan brand is reserved for Nvidia’s most powerful and expensive cards, and it’s a relatively new name – the first three Titan cards only begun to emerge in 2013, and the Titan X is the first time Nvidia's Maxwell chips has been given this high-end designation.
There’s no denying the GeForce GTX Titan X is a worthy addition to Nvidia’s high-end stable, taking the crown as the company's fastest single-GPU card. As ever, though, it’s not exactly cheap – you’ll have to pay $999 to get your hands on this card.
SEE ALSO: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 review
Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X: Under the Hood
The Titan X uses the 28nm Maxwell architecture found inside the Nvidia’s GTX 900-series cards, but it’s far more powerful than any previous card. For starters, the chip itself is 551mm2 in size – far larger than the 398mm2 of the GTX 980, and bigger than any current AMD rival.
That monster die contains a mighty eight billion transistors. Again, that’s more than anything else can offer: almost two billion more than AMD’s top GPU, the Radeon R9 290X, and almost three billion ahead of Nvidia’s current flagships.
These are undeniably impressive numbers, and the GM200 Maxwell core looks even better when stacked up against the last generation of Titan products. The GM200 core used in the Titan X is physically smaller than the Kepler hardware used in older Titan cards, but Nvidia has still found room for almost a billion extra transistors.
The rest of the Titan X’s specification is no less daunting. It’s got 3,072 stream processors, which is over 1,000 more than the GTX 980 offers, and they’re organised into 192 texture units divided into six Graphics Processing Clusters – two more GPCs than the GTX 980. The core is clocked to 1,000MHz with an average boost speed of 1,075MHz – good speeds that beat older Titan cards but are still a tad slower than other current-generation Nvidia chips.
The upside of this is that the Titan X offers a mighty 6.2 TFLOPS of theoretical power. That’s a significant chunk more than the 4.6 TFLOPS offered by the GTX 980, and also far more than both of the last generation’s single-core Titan cards.
This is the first graphics card to include a mighty 12GB of GDDR5 RAM, and it’s clocked to 1,753MHz – the same speed as Nvidia’s other current cards. It’s accessed with a 384-bit bus, which is wider than Nvidia’s other GTX 900-series cards. The 12GB of memory serves up 336GB/s of bandwidth, which is more than any current single-GPU card from AMD and Nvidia. It’s this record-breaking amount of memory that Nvidia thinks will give this chip the edge when it comes to 4k gaming.
SEE ALSO: AMD Radeon R9 290 Review
This is clearly a monster GPU, but Maxwell’s impressive efficiency means you’ll only need one each of the eight- and six-pin power connectors, and its top TDP of 250W remains lower than AMD’s R9 290 and R9 290X cards. The cooling hasn’t changed much from previous Nvidia designs, either; there’s a copper vapour-chamber unit and a single fan beneath a 267mm aluminium heatsink. This time around Nvidia has painted the metal black, and it’s augmented with an illuminated Nvidia logo - not only is this card the fastest but it's one of the best looking too.
On the inside, support for DirectX 12, Nvidia’s DSR and MFAA are all included, and display outputs on the reference sample stretch to three DisplayPort connectors and single HDMI and DVI-I ports.
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How We Tested
We’ve locked and loaded five games for this GPU test. Battlefield 4, Bioshock Infinite and Crysis 3 all return from our previous reviews, and we’ve added Metro: Last Light and Batman: Arkham Origins to the mix. We’ve tested at 1,920 x 1,080, 2,560 x 1,440 and even 3,840 x 2,160 to see which card is best across single-screens – and to check if any of them can handle 4K.
We’ve used 3D Mark’s Fire Strike test and four Unigine Heaven benchmarks to test theoretical performance, and we’ve taken idle and load temperatures and power requirements to see which card is the coolest and most frugal.
Our test rig consists of an Asus X79-Deluxe motherboard, Intel Core i7-4960X processor, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB hard disk.
To get prices we visited www.scan.co.uk and noted down the cheapest stock-speed card we could find, although we will be referring to the various overclocked and tweaked models available, which will be more expensive, later on in the review.