While many praised NVIDIA for bringing out the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti for the ridiculously low price of $699, many questioned why they created a card that was better than the Titan X for almost half the price. Well, fear not, NVIDIA have just released a follow up to last year’s Titan X and the Titan once again takes its rightful place at the top of the totem pole with the Titan Xp. While the design might be the same, even down to the lettering, NVIDIA has taken the Titan X and they have tweaked it to make it the most powerful gaming card on the market.
The new Titan Xp is based on the same GP102 graphics processing units that were used for the 2016 Titan X and for the newly released GTX 1080 Ti. However, NVIDIA have increased the streaming multiprocessor units to 30SMs which is 2 more than the GTX 1080 Ti and Titan X’s 28SMs. The Titan Xp now features 3840 CUDA cores vs the Titan X’s 3584 CUDA cores. The Boost clock speed has been slightly increased from the Titan X, however it now matches the far cheaper GTX 1080 Ti at 1582MHz.
The RAM has also been boosted and now offers 547.7GB/s of bandwidth compared to the 480GB/s offered by the Titan X and the 484GB/s offered by the new GTX 1080 Ti. The memory interface is also slightly higher at 384-bit vs the GTX 1080 Ti’s 352-bit. NVIDIA have kept the RAM at 12GB of GDDR5X, which is the same as the old Titan X and is still one more GB than the GTX 1080 Ti. However, for the price it would have been nice to see a jump to 16GB just to give users that little bit of extra bragging rights. While it all looks really good on paper and in preliminary tests, the proof will be in the pudding and we will have to see how it really performs in a variety of setups. One thing is for sure and that is that the Titan Xp has taken the top spot once again.
As mentioned, the design has not changed at all and the new Titan Xp is identical to the Titan X. Even the lettering on the card reads Titan X and not Titan Xp. This could be due to the fact that NVIDIA is just recycling older parts from their Titan X line. The power requirements remain the same as the Titan X and you will need to make sure that you have a high quality 600W power supply to run this behemoth. However, any user who will purchase this card will more than likely be running a much higher wattage power supply in any case as there is no need to use a cheap PSU when the card alone costs $1200.
If you are running the older Titan X then you might be quite annoyed that there are now two newer and more powerful cards on the market. However, the 2016 Titan X is still one of the fastest cards on the market and there is no need to upgrade to the newer Titan Xp as your older Titan is still a formidable card. While the Titan Xp costs the same as the 2016 Titan X, I would still rather go for the GTX 1080 Ti or I would even consider purchasing two GTX 1080 Ti’s and running them in SLI. If you are after a high-end gaming PC then head over to our high-end guide where you might find your next rig.
