The NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X Review
Never one to shy away from high-end video cards, in 2013 NVIDIA took the next step towards establishing a definitive brand for high-end cards with the launch of the GeForce GTX Titan. Proudly named after NVIDIA’s first massive supercomputer win – the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Titan – it set a new bar in performance. It also set a new bar in build quality for a single-GPU card, and at $999 it also set a new bar in price. The first true “luxury” video card, NVIDIA would gladly sell you one of their finest video cards if you had the pockets deep enough for it.
Since 2013 the Titan name has stuck around for additional products, although it never had quite the same impact as the original. The GTX Titan Black was a minor refresh of the GTX Titan, moving to a fully enabled GK110B GPU and from a consumer/gamer standpoint somewhat redundant due to the existence of the nearly-identical GTX 780 Ti. Meanwhile the dual-GPU GTX Titan Z was largely ignored, its performance sidelined by its unprecedented $3000 price tag and AMD’s very impressive Radeon R9 295X2 at half the price.
Now in 2015 NVIDIA is back with another Titan, and this time they are looking to recapture a lot of the magic of the original Titan. First teased back at GDC 2015 in an Epic Unreal Engine session, and used to drive more than a couple of demos at the show, the GTX Titan X gives NVIDIA’s flagship video card line the Maxwell treatment, bringing with it all of the new features and sizable performance gains that we saw from Maxwell last year with the GTX 980. To be sure, this isn’t a reprise of the original Titan – there are some important differences that make the new Titan not the same kind of prosumer card the original was – but from a performance standpoint NVIDIA is looking to make the GTX Titan X as memorable as the original. Which is to say that it’s by far the fastest single-GPU card on the market once again.