Nvidia GTX Titan X could restart a planet with GM200 core, 12GB VRAM [update]

Update: South African prices have been released for the MSI, EVGA and Gigabyte GTX Titan X. The prices you ask? Well, they range between R16 999 and R18 999, with the EVGA GTX Titan X OC edition leading the line in terms of price.

Nvidia has been faffing around with other things this year, namely shoving mobile computing chips in cars at CES 2015, and announcing Android consoles in the form of the Shield at GDC 2015, but thankfully the company hasn’t forgotten how to make insane graphics cards. The Nvidia GTX Titan X is the latest flagship in the green corner, and it’s spec sheet is absolutely insane.

Read more: Nvidia Shield is a $200 Android TV gaming console for fence-sitters

Boasting a 28nm Maxwell-based GM200 core, the Titan X boasts 8-billion transistors, a 384-bit memory interface, 3072 CUDA cores and 192 texture mapping units. The card also features a toasty 250w TDP and requires a 600w minimum power supply, with a 6- and 8-pin power delivery.

All these numbers are incredible to ponder, but perhaps the amount of VRAM in this thing is the truly astounding part. Each card gets 12GB of VRAM, which is about enough to theoretically store and deliver ultra texture details of a game like Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor twice.

It isn’t exactly advantageous for those looking for a gaming card, but it’s definitely a positive for those with hungry graphics-intensive software. Additionally, the memory bus is around 50% faster than Nvidia’s GTX 980, which is for all intents and purposes, a beast in its own right.

Prices for the card begins at US$999, so expect this card to retail for over R15 000 in South Africa — or the price of a decent high-end computer.

You’ll probably find better value in the forthcoming AMD Radeon R9 390X, a card rumoured to boast 8GB of VRAM, 4096 stream processors and a slightly faster computing speed of 8.6 TFlops (compared to the Titan X’s 7.2 TFlops), or perhaps two GTX 980s in SLI would be a better value for money purchase.

Nevertheless, the GTX Titan X is available from today.