Minutes ago NVIDIA announced unexpectedly a new version of their TITAN X graphics card, joining the 1000 series lineup currently consisting of the GTX 1060, GTX 1070, and GTX 1080. The TITAN X has been known as the end-all-be-all GPU that everybody jokes and drools over having, until their 1000 series dropped. Now, the new TITAN X, priced at $1,200, features 12 billion transistors, 3584 CUDA cores, and 12GB of GDDR5X memory; 11 teraflops! Most excitingly of all, it features the Pascal architecture. The GTX 1080 is currently overkill for 1080p or 1440p gaming. Even 4K gaming is more than playable on a single GTX 1080 on most new AAA games minus anti-aliasing (which at that resolution is not needed anyway). The new Titan X is supposedly 3x faster than its’ predecessor according to Nvidia’s website. The GTX Titan X will (predictably) be a single-GPU solution for absolutely overkill performance at 4K. I can only imagine how it will perform at 1080p or 1440p. Or should we wait for the 1080 Ti?

(Source: Nvidia’s website, YouTube video)

Moments ago, American technology company NVIDIA, known best for their graphics processing units (GPUs) and system-on-a-chip (SoC) products, revealed the latest products in their new lineup of GeForce graphics cards based on their recent Pascal architecture, the 1000 series. Over 40,000 people tuned into the company’s Twitch channel to watch the stream live from DreamHack. So far, NVIDIA has only revealed Pascal-based cards in the Tesla lineup – and these are purely for calculations and rendering and do not have a video output.

Nvidia has announced the GTX 1080, and showed gameplay of new games like Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Tom Clancy’s The Division running at max settings, over 60 frames per second; and then they let through that it was running on the GTX 1080. Nvidia has called Pascal the largest processor architecture project “in the history of humanity”, claiming it took “7 years”, “thousands of people”, and $7 billion USD in R&D to create – they said that with that money they’re “pretty sure you could go to Mars.” The 16 nanometer manufacturing process will help for low-latency, high-performance gaming and more. They claim that a single GTX 1080 is faster than two 980 SLIs, and twice the performance and three times the energy efficiency of a single Titan X, saying that it’s “almost irresponsible amounts of performance.” They showed a real-time demonstration of the GTX 1080, running at 2.1 GHz on air cooling, keeping a 65-67 degrees Celsius. It has 8GB of G5x VRAM, 9 teraflops, and will cost $599 for the standard edition and $699 for the NVIDIA-designed Founders’ Edition. It will be available May 27th.

The GTX 1070 was also announced, with 8GB of G5 memory, 6.5 teraflops, $379 MSRP and $449 for the Founders’ Edition; also faster than a GTX Titan X.

They also announced Ansel, an advanced screenshotting utility that gives the user a free camera, 3D integration, and filters, all at the driver level for their screenshotting pleasure. They also give you the ability to use a cell phone and something like Google Cardboard for a cheap, low-cost virtual reality experience.

Futhermore, they announced some additions to their VRWorks API, including realistic water, ball-bouncing, falling, and other types of physics assisted by Nvidia PhysX and integrated with your haptic feedback controller. They also will be adding path traced audio, with advanced acoustic models – the world’s first real-time physics-based acoustics engine of this type. Usually, audio is directional / positional, but the environment will now be affected by the sound waves as they would realistically. They have found a way to calculate this efficiently, in real-time, on Nvidia GPUs.

To showcase these technologies, NVIDIA has created the NVIDIA VR FUNHOUSE, which will be available on Steam and open-source for users to tinker with and improve.

Furthermore, Simultaneous Multi-Display allows 16 viewpoints into the 3D world for a wide variety of display support, and improved Nvidia Surround. Previously, 3 cards would be needed for triple-monitor Surround without the side monitors being warped, but the new Pascal architecture GPUs can achieve this with a single GPU. Stereo 3D rendering is also possible in a single pass, improving performance for virtual reality solutions.

If you were looking at purchasing a GTX 970, 980, 980ti, or Titan X any time soon at full price, hold off; the wait will be worth it.

Performance gaming and workstation graphics card giant Nvidia is releasing a third installation to their Shield line of Android devices. This new entry into the series is titled the Nvidia Shield Android TV console; a powerful gaming box running the new Android TV set-top box firmware from Google, modified by Nvidia to fit their console of course. Usually you wouldn’t expect much from an Android console, but it’s so powerful it can literally play Crysis. The box is expected to release on May 28th*.

The box’s base model will ship for $199, and feature 16GB of internal memory. Recently, Amazon leaked a product page for a $299 model with 500GB of internal memory.

The technical specifications of this device are quite amazing for what it is in my opinion. According to Nvidia’s website, the system will feature an Nvidia Tegra X1 processor, sporting a 256-core Maxwell GPU with 3GB of VRAM. It’s 4K Ultra HD ready, able to play 4K content at 60FPS in the VP9, H264, and H265 formats. It can do 4K capture at 30FPS in H264 or H265 formats. It supports up to 7.1 or 5.1 surround sound through HDMI. It can play back at 24-bit/192kHz through HDMI and USB, and upsample to that through USB. The $199 model will feature 16GB of internal memory, and the $299 model will feature 500GB of internal memory. It supports 802.11ac 2×2 MIMO 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 4.1/BLE. As far as ports, it features gigabit ethernet, HDMI 2.0, two type-A USB 3.0 ports, a micro-USB 2.0 port, a MicroSD slot, and an IR Receiver compatible with the Logitech Harmony. It will weigh 23 OZ / 654 g, will be 5.1 inches / 130mm tall, 8.3 inches / 210mm wide, and 1 inch / 25mm thick. The operating system is the new Google Cast ready Android TV. It uses a 40w power adapter, which typically uses 5-10w of power.

Out of the box, it will have the Google Play Store, Google Play Movies & TV, Google Play Music, YouTube, PLEX, and Photos and Videos installed undoubtedly among other proprietary Nvidia software. Apart from playing all of your favorite Android games and using your favorite Android apps on the big screen, it will stream Nvidia GRID games at 1080p 60FPS* from the cloud (basically HD, gaming-grade remote desktop of high-end games from their server PCs to your console like OnLive), stream games from your personal Nvidia-powered gaming PC using Nvidia GameStream, and use Nvidia Share, which allows you to record, take screenshots, and livestream to Twitch.tv while playing. It’s basically Nvidia Shadowplay for the Shield devices. Also, some major AAA game developers will be porting games like Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, Crysis 3, War Thunder, Half Life 2, Portal, Metal Gear Rising, Doom 3, Resident Evil 5, and more exclusively to the Shield console, not to mention the great high-quality games that exist already on the Android store being playable on the Shield, such as the Grand Theft Auto games like Chinatown Wars, III, Vice City, San Andreas, Max Payne 1 and 2 (which are all AAA titles ported to Android), and high-quality Android games like Real Racing 3, Modern Combat 5, N.O.V.A. 3, Shadowgun: Deadzone, and more being playable on the console just because it runs Android. Some games that already exist will also be optimized in both performance and control schemes for the Shield, although I assume as with previous Shield devices you can map your controller controls to user-defined areas on the touchscreen for certain applications and games.

I personally will be purchasing the $299 500GB model as downloadable games are quite big nowadays on Android and I feel 16GB just won’t cut it. Even with expandable SD card space you can’t get a 500GB SD card for $100 or under. Stay tuned for more information on the Nvidia Shield Android TV console over the coming days, and more content (unboxing, setup, etc.) once it’s released.

– by Gavin (Gaveroid)

* Some information was taken from ShackNews. I’ve been unable to find this information anywhere else through light searching so its’ credibility is questionable. My apologies to ShackNews for this.