Nvidia promises improved gaming with GeForce GTX Titan GPU

IDG News Service - Nvidia on Tuesday announced the GeForce GTX Titan, a GPU designed to handle the most demanding games by harnessing the processing power of 2,668 graphics cores.

The GPU, which the company claims is the world's fastest graphics processor, will provide smoother graphics rendering and support higher display resolutions, compared with its predecessors, according to the company.

The GPU has 75 percent more processors than the GeForce GTX 680 GPU, which was the company's fastest graphics processor.

The GPU delivers 4.5 teraflops of single-precision and 1.3 teraflops of double-precision performance. Titan is about 35 percent faster than its predecessor and has 7 billion transistors, an Nvidia spokesman said.

The higher core count will enable the GPU to crunch calculations in a more power-efficient manner. Instead of cranking up clock frequency, chip makers are adding more cores to speed up a processor.

Nvidia's Titan graphics chip can handle the most demanding games available today, Nvidia said, so it should be able to handle Crysis, a compute-intensive game that is often used as a benchmark for the power of GPUs. The highly anticipated Crysis 3 is being released later this year.

The chip fits into PCs the size of gaming consoles, Nvidia said in a statement. Three graphics cards can be linked and used together in a single system via SLI (scalable link interface), adding even more graphics power to a system.

The GPU is based on the Kepler architecture, which is also being used in graphics processors that power the Titan supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is ranked as the world's fastest supercomputer in the Top500 list.

The GPU will start at US$999, and will be available in systems and through retailers. The product will be available worldwide.

PC makers like CyberPower and Falcon Northwest have already announced systems with GTX Titan. CyberPower is touting its Fang III gaming PC as a "gaming supercomputer," and the system starts at $1,699. Falcon Northwest hasn't finalized the pricing of its system yet.

Agam Shah covers PCs, tablets, servers, chips and semiconductors for IDG News Service. Follow Agam on Twitter at @agamsh. Agam's e-mail address is agam_shah@idg.com