NVIDIA Announces Flagship GPU ‘Titan RTX’ with VirtuaLink Connector

NVIDIA today unveiled their most powerful GPU yet, the TITAN RTX (nicknamed T-Rex). While it’s priced clear out of the regular consumer market at $2,500, that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to use next-gen VR headsets thanks to its VirtuaLink connector port.

Like NVIDIA’s other 20-series GPUs, TITAN RTX is based on the company’s new Turing architecture. The company’s latest GPU isn’t really built for gamers in mind, but rather more befitting the workload of AI researchers, deep learning devs, data scientists, and game and video professionals. The company would be remiss though if they didn’t capture whoever has the pockets deep enough to shell out the $2,500 for what NVIDIA touts as “world’s most powerful desktop GPU,” providing what we’d hope to be VR’s best real-time ray tracing performance money can buy.

To date, all of the company’s 20-series reference cards feature the VirtuaLink connector, and we expect a majority of manufacturers to carry over the next-gen VR port. The Quadro RTX cards, RTX 2080 Ti, 2080, and 2070—and now the TITAN RTX all include it.

VirtuaLink is new connector standard created by a consortium representing many of VR’s most prominent players—NVIDIA, AMD, Valve, Oculus, and Microsoft. The port itself offers four high-speed HBR3 DisplayPort lanes (which are “scalable for future needs”), a USB3.1 data channel for on-board cameras, and up to 27 watts of power. The standard is said to be “purpose-built for VR,” being optimized for latency and the needs of next-generation headsets. That means a singular cable connected your computer from your next VR headset.

Although there’s no specific launch date yet. NVIDIA says TITAN RTX will be available “later this month” in the U.S. and Europe.

TITAN RTX Specs

• 576 multi-precision Turing Tensor Cores, providing up to 130 teraflops of deep learning performance.
• 72 Turing RT Cores, delivering up to 11 GigaRays per second of real-time ray-tracing performance.
• 24GB of high-speed GDDR6 memory with 672GB/s of bandwidth — 2x the memory of previous-generation TITAN GPUs — to fit larger models and datasets.
• 100GB/s NVIDIA NVLink can pair two TITAN RTX GPUs to scale memory and compute.
• Incredible performance and memory bandwidth for real-time 8K video editing.
• VirtualLink port provides the performance and connectivity required by next-gen VR headsets.

Check out the full specs at NVIDIA.