NVIDIA Titan X (Pascal) Turns 10: Pascal Flagship with 12 GB VRAM for 1.299 Euro

The First Consumer GP102 Without the GTX Prefix

Before the release of Titan X (Pascal), the flagship was the GTX Titan X based on Maxwell architecture. The new card became the first device with the Titan prefix that did not include the word GTX in its name. It brought the Pascal architecture to gamers, offering the GP102-400 chip with 3,584 CUDA cores.

Unlike server solutions, the consumer version used not HBM2 but 12 GB of GDDR5X memory on a 384-bit bus. This provided a bandwidth of about 480 GB/s, which was approximately 50% more than the GTX 1080.

Performance and Power Consumption

In tests at the time, the card demonstrated a performance increase of about 32% compared to the GTX 1080 in UHD resolution. However, the price for these capabilities was high: TDP was 250 W versus 180 W for the competitor, requiring a more powerful cooling system.

Positioning and Succession

NVIDIA limited sales to two cards per customer. A year after the release of Titan X (Pascal), the company released the GTX 1080 Ti, which offered similar performance but for significantly less money (around 819 Euro). Later, the fully unlocked chip followed as the Titan Xp.

The table below lists key specifications of the model at launch and compares it with modern flagships: