The preemptive strike against AMD. Nvida came in swinging with the GeForce GTX Titan X graphics processor that was outed in March of this year. A full implementation of the GM200 die means it's a big bruiser of a GPU that's still fabbed on the very mature 28nm process.

8bn transistors that take their cue from the energy-efficient second-generation Maxwell architecture means Titan X can do a lot with a 250W power budget. Nvidia goes big on memory, ramping it all the way to 12GB, ostensibly suiting applications common on workstations, but Titan X remains the king of the consumer graphics hill, too... at least until AMD's Fiji architecture comes to market in a month's time.

Nvidia is seeking to cement its position as provider of premier consumer GPUs with the release of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti. Said GPU takes in almost all of the goodness present in Titan X, reduces the overly-massive framebuffer in half, and creates a card that it hopes will challenge AMD's upcoming best from both price and performance points of view.