Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced the "most advanced GPU ever built" today, at the GDC in San Francisco's Moscone Centre, the GeForce GTX Titan X. In a break from the norm, Huang didn't make the announcement at an Nvidia event but "in a surprise appearance with Epic's CEO and founder Tim Sweeney", during Epic's GDC keynote.
The 'gate crashing' by the Nvidia CEO is explained by Epic Games being on stage discussing a collaboration with Weta Digital, Oculus and Nvidia. Epic's Tim Sweeney was discussing the 'Thief in the shadows' VR experience and said that right now there is no graphics solution available with enough power to take the project from the drawing board to reality. Sweeney asked the crowd "Does anyone have any ideas how we can do this?". At that point Huang bounded onto the stage with a box-fresh Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X. Huang exclaimed "It's the most advanced GPU the world has ever seen," signed the box and presented the card to Sweeney.
'Thief in the shadows' VR experience combines the software of Weta Digital (Hobbit movie digital imagery creators) and Epic's Unreal Engine 4 with Oculus 'Crescent Bay' prototype VR hardware and the Nvidia Titan X GPUs Together they have created "a virtual world of unparalleled detail and action," according to Tim Sweeney. Those who have experienced the VR demo will feel as if they've really explored a dragon's lair, according to the Nvidia blog. Asynchronous timewarp and late-latching tech helps minimise unwanted virtual un-reality effects caused by latency.
What kind of specs does the Nvidia GeForce Titan X boast? Well, right now we only have a few basic details from this preliminary announcement. Huang said the Titan X boasts 8 billion transistors and a 12GB buffer. To be the most advanced and powerful Titan ever we guess it will be Maxwell based but don't have any confirmed information about key specs such as the number of cores, core and memory clocks, bus width and so on.
Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference, which isn't so far in the future, on 17th March, will be the platform for a full reveal for the new Titan we hear. Even without many details it's good to see the Titan X in the flesh before that date.
PhysX code opened up to UE4 developers
Nvidia has announced that it has decided to open up PhysX code to all Unreal Engine 4 developers. The engine is built-in and fully-integrated into the development tools in UE4 and now all UE4 developers can enjoy full C++ source code access to the CPU-based implementation of PhysX 3.3.3, including the clothing and destruction libraries. This means developers can view and modify this PhysX code alongside the complete C++ source code for UE4. The source code is available on Github.
