NVIDIA's GeForce GTX TITAN X Becomes First 12GB Consumer Graphics Card

Deathspawner writes: When NVIDIA announced its GeForce GTX TITAN X at GTC, no one was surprised that it'd be faster than the company's previous top-end card, the GTX 980. But what did impress many is that the company said the card would sport a staggering 12GB of VRAM. As Techgage found, pushing that 12GB is an exercise in patience — you really have to go out of your way to come even close. Additional reviews available at PC Perspective and AnandTech. The latter notes, "...from a technical perspective, the GTX Titan X and GM200 GPU represent an interesting shift in high-end GPU design goals for NVIDIA, one whose ramifications I’m not sure we fully understand yet. By building what’s essentially a bigger version of GM204, heavy on graphics and light on FP64 compute, NVIDIA has been able to drive up performance without a GM204-like increase in die size. At 601mm2 GM200 is still NVIDIA’s largest GPU to date, but by producing their purist graphics GPU in quite some time, it has allowed NVIDIA to pack more graphics horsepower than ever before into a 28nm GPU. What remains to be seen then is whether this graphics/FP32-centric design is a one-off occurrence for 28nm, or if this is the start of a permanent shift in NVIDIA GPU design."

Comments

Re:Sigh

[Goragoth]

In case people are confused it is important to point out that the Titan cards aren't aimed at gamers. They are partly a PR stunt for Nvidia (look, we make the biggest, baddest GPU out there), and partly of interest to developers working in graphics research (either developing tech for next gen games, GPGPU research, fluid simulations, and other projects). When you are raycasting massive voxel scenes for example, the 12GB can look rather attractive.

At the end of the day it is very much a niche product, and calling it a "consumer card" is perhaps a bit of a misnomer. If all you are looking to do is to consume content (i.e. play games) this isn't the card for you, just SLI as many GTX980's as you can afford together and be done with it.

Re:Sigh

[Shinobi]

The reason Bitcoin was done on AMD GPU's was because AMD had a bitshift instruction, and that due to how simple Bitcoin is, AMD's rather retarded memory handling didn't cause any choking. Double precision had absolutely zero to do with Bitcoin running well on AMD.

AMD's memory handling means that the actual Double Precision performance you get out of a given card is extremely different from the theoretical maximum. In fact, for many real-world tasks, Nvidia+CUDA delivers better DP performance than the AMD paper tigers, especially per watt, and so the HPC world heavily leans towards Nvidia, even with DP heavy tasks. For tasks that doesn't need SP, like many forms of signal analysis etc? Forget AMD, not worth the bother of shitty drivers, piss-poor memory handling, worse performance per watt.

As for RAM, there are things it's useful for, especially since the Titan also has its Universal Physics Solver, meaning that together with the RAM amount, you can put together very detailed sims at decent resolutions and framerates, all on a single card.

Re:What portion of the memory is usable this time?

[BlueBlade]

RAM is very important if you use high resolutions. If you game in 1080p, then yeah this won't tell you much. If you have a 4k monitor though, 3GB isn't enough so you can at least look at the RAM to narrow your selection, then look at benchmarks.