NVIDIA dropped the Titan X Pascal bomb not long ago, surprising almost everyone with how early it was released, and that they had market availability this week. The card is based on a completely new GP102 graphics processor that is pretty much a 50% upscaled version of the GP104 used on the GTX 1080. The new GPU also includes features geared toward the more professional space, like INT8 support, a capability that's useful for machine learning. However, the card does not support full speed FP64 or FP16 performance - unlike earlier Titan cards, which made it interesting for video rendering or other content creation tasks. These features are completely useless to you as gamers, so let's focus on what matters to you.

Out of the box, at 4K, the Titan X Pascal is a whopping 30% faster than the GTX 1080. The performance uplift against the GTX 980 Ti, NVIDIA's previous-generation flagship, is 37%. There really isn't much that can compare to GTX Titan X Pascal with the exception of GTX 1080 SLI, which we benched to be around 1.5x the performance of a single card, while including games that don't scale well in SLI. That means that GTX Titan X Pascal roughly sits in the middle, between the GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 SLI. While this may not sound impressive at first, its single-GPU design frees you from the spectre of application multi-GPU support, which continues to haunt both SLI and CrossFire.

NVIDIA is basically reusing the GTX 1080 Founders Edition cooler, which was already too weak to handle the heat output of the GTX 1080. As a result, the GTX Titan X sits in thermal throttle almost all the time; we tested it and reached a maximum Boost clock of 1835 MHz, which was only active for a few moments before the clock slowly dropped until the card reached its thermal limit. It plateaued to run at 1692 MHz on average, which is obviously still much higher than the base clock of 1418 MHz. I did a quick test with the power limit and temperature target at their maximum at stock clocks. In that scenario, the card gains about 5-6% performance at 4K depending on the game. When I did the same test with our maximum OC clocks applied, the performance increase was a whopping 19% over performance out of the box! While idle fan noise is low, the card does not include the highly popular idle-fan off feature. In gaming, the card is definitely noisier than the GTX 1080 Founders Edition, reaching almost 40 dBA with a heavy load, which is quite audible. Just like on the GTX 1080, the cooler is the weakest part of Titan X Pascal.

Power efficiency is amazing though, just like on all other Pascal-based cards. In typical gaming, the card uses only 205 watts, with peaks of up to 268 watts, which is also what the board power limit is configured to; even if the limit were higher, the cooler couldn't handle the extra heat anyway. Compared to AMD power efficiency, NVIDIA is incredibly far ahead. The GTX Titan X is almost twice as power efficient as AMD's Polaris cards.

Titan X Pascal is only available directly from NVIDIA; there will be no custom designs from board partners and no other stores will sell just the card. A few system integrators will offer Titan X Pascal as part of pre-built systems. In forums, many users have reported issues with the NVIDIA order process, like broken "Order Now" buttons, failed transactions, missing emails, "in-stock" claims even though new stock doesn't arrive until next week, and an extremely long two-week processing duration for direct debit. On the other hand. I've seen many reports of people who already got their hands on Titan X Pascal, so orders are definitely working.

NVIDIA has set a price of $1200 for the Titan X Pascal, no not $1199, nope, they had to keep that last dollar. Also, pricing has gone up by 20% over the first Titan X that was "only" $999. Such pricing might seem crazy to many, but it's not unexpected; NVIDIA owns the high-end market completely, with AMD barely reaching half the performance or efficiency of this card. If you were NVIDIA, wouldn't you exploit that advantage, too? Taking a closer look at performance per dollar, we see the card 30% behind the GTX 1080, which is not that much if you are in the market for a high-end card and have the money to spend. Titan X Pascal will also give you the highest framerates no matter which game you play, something that SLI can not guarantee. Apart from pricing, which you either can or can't afford, the bigger issue to me is the engineering behind the card. NVIDIA has once again used a cooling solution that can't handle the heat output of the fantastically engineered GPU, resulting in significant loss of performance, and with no custom-board designs available, there is no cure in sight. Well, the only alternative is watercooling; the first blocks are already appearing in the market - it is the way I would go. Build a quiet watercooling solution around Titan X Pascal and it will fly and still run quietly.