Say hello to the TITAN X

Bow down and make way for the mother of all single GPUs the TITAN X. With a ludicrous 12 GB of GDDR5 VRAM and 3072 CUDA cores, the fact that it’s still fabricated on a 28 nm node hardly seems to matter. This beast is nearly 30 per cent faster than the GTX 980.

What sets this card aside and lets it achieve the ridiculous performance it delivers are the 24 SMs and the 96 ROPs. It’s these ROPs that let you crank your anti-aliasing all the way up and still end up with silky smooth frame rates even in the most demanding of titles out today. Moreover, the high SM count keep things moving at a steady rate by dividing all the processing required among the various CUDA cores evenly.

The one downside of the TITAN X is that it being a reference-based design, it comes with only one fan and that means that the card often reaches its peak temperature of 800C and that makes the fan whine. While playing GTA V on absolute max settings, the game rarely dropped below 80 FPS, while the reference GTX 980 could only manage an average frame rate of “only” 64. The TITAN X managed to crush every game thrown at it in 1080p resolutions. It is clear that NVIDIA released this card to cater to the pixel lovers out there as it is meant to be used at 4K.

At around Rs 85,000 this card is not cheap in any sense of the word, which is why the lack of a back plate is rather perplexing. However, this temperature and fan noise aside, the TITAN X is truly a marvel of engineering and is a must-have card for the gaming fanatic with loaded pockets.