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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."
It's certainly a legitimate question.
On the other hand, as I remarked to a friend when discussing graphics cards the other day, it seems to me that none of the numbers on the cards really matter - RAM, Clock Speed, etc. There are so many variables that you might as well say that it has 12 GigaDrawing Cores and 256 SuperShaders with a 1.5 TeraTransit Hop Interval. What really matters is the final performance, using the universal standard measure of FoC(3), aka "Frames (per second) of Crysis3".
Honestly, when I look at graphics cards (and I'm currently doing so for my next system), that's what matters to me most in comparing them - looking at benchmark results among all the major games. Certainly Nvidia should be telling us up front how the architecture works, and that you have 3.5GB of main/fast memory or whatever, but benchmark statistics from 3rd parties seem to me to not only be more important, but not exactly (or at least not easily) fakeable.
That said, it's interesting to me that the benchmarks I've seen for this card mark it as inferior to the 295X2, which is not only almost a year older, but significantly cheaper. I'm personally hesitant to go with AMD, as my current experience with AMD drivers on my desktop has been downright horrible, compared to a relatively painless experience with my current laptop running an Nvidia card, but I have to wonder what's going on when Nvidia comes out with something like this, a year later, and at seemingly worse performance.
The Titan cards ARE aimed at gamers.
Have you seen the reviews? Did you see the presentation today? Did you see the double precision compute performance? This is not a compute card.
Quadro = Workstation
GTX = Gamer
Titan = Gamer with more money than sense
Yeah I noticed that nVidia is playing games with the FP64 with the Titan X. :-(
Conflating high end gamers using Titan X with the scientific performance of the previous Titan Black and Titan is rather dodgy.
I was at the keynote at GTC this morning and it really depends on what you are doing. If you want to do numerical simulation, it is not very useful because double precision performance is terrible. But if you do data mining, you mostly care about bandwidth and single precision performance. And then 12GB isn't too much. Actually I find it still a bit on the low side. Intel Xeon Phi are featuring 16GB this days. And in the realm of data analysis fitting the data on the accelerator is what make the difference ebetween the accelerator is great and the accelerator is useless.