NVIDIA has certainly outdone itself with the new Pascal Titan X that blows the former king GTX 1080 out of the water as the benchmarks finally surface.
The new Pascal-based Titan X from NVIDIA was not revealed with much fanfare as it was just casually shown in a tech conference by NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang on a stage. It shocked the whole PC gaming community as they thought the GTX 1080 would still be king for quite some time before the upcoming GP100 Pascal GPU to be released in 2017.
For some, they have already expected a new Titan X to replace the Maxwell model. Initially, some people even thought that it would be named the Titan Z.
The NVIDIA Pascal Titan X was able to dish out Hitman 2016 DX12 at 4K with 58 FPS compared to the GTX 1080's score of 47 FPS at most, Forbes has learned. It was also able to crank out 80 FPS for Shadow of Mordor at 4K while the 1080 only scored 61 FPS.
Significant improvements in the framerates are thanks to the NVIDIA Titan X carrying 1204 more CUDA cores compared to the GTX 1080. It also has 12GB GDDR5X memory compared to the 8GB in its little brother.
Despite the lower core and boost clock speeds, the Pascal Titan X is still able to beat the GTX 1080 at every test or game possible. However, it could still be inferior compared to the new NVIDIA Quadro P6000 with a full set of 3840 CUDA cores for high-end workstations.
Unfortunately, the added performance also means that there will be added costs. The NVIDIA Titan X powered by the Pascal GPU costs $1200 which is almost the price of two GTX 1080 cards, ExtremeTech reported.
Most consumers would be willing to buy the new Pascal Titan X simply because it is the current top of the line card for consumer-grade video cards. However, the roughly 40 percent increase in performance may not be worth the almost two times price tag for those who currently have GTX 1080s in their systems.
PC gamers could buy the expensive Pascal Titan X or wait for NVIDIA's rumored GTX 1080 Ti in 2017. Those on the Team Red could also wait for AMD's upcoming Vega cards which will be more powerful than their current Polaris GPUs.