NVidia announced their new TITAN X card yesterday, heralded as "the most advanced and powerful GPU the world has ever seen".

Reported specs include a Maxwell chip (or dual-Maxwell chips), perhaps on 28nm TSMC silicon or perhaps on the next (smaller, faster, denser, and more power-efficient) production node, 12GB video memory (people say GDDR5, but could be anything), and a spectacumongous 8 billion transistor count. This beast will obviously be a power-sucking heat pig and is expected to cost more than a professional hitman.

I don't seriously expect to ever buy a TITAN X, I can't even justify paying the outrageous cost of a TITAN Z, not even a TITAN BLACK nor a humble half-mighty plain TITAN - let alone a pair in SLI or a few extra cards to stuff into other computers. My wallet would sink as fast as the Titanic, glub-glub-glub - a tale (flawlessly rendered in beautiful 4K!) of cold, dark, suffering horror, with (once my female learns of my foolish misdeeds) no survivors. Maybe the Enterprise/Server/Workstation crowd will get to play with this awesome new toy (or its professionally-themed siblings), but I don't really expect many sane gamers to have one.

But I am excited that this card will likely be the vanguard of a new NVidia GPU product family. And maybe scare those AMD slackers into accelerating development on their own next GPU product family*. We've gone too long with rebadged minor tweaks and twiddles and refinements to ye olde 28nm TSMC - can only go so far with new paint, y'know - no more evolutionary, time for revolutionary!

And I am more excited by the notion that once this mighty cardzilla hits the streets, all of the existing (and suddenly "sucky") GPU products out there will methodically shuffle a rung down the pricing hierarchy. I really don't mind having "sucky" GTX980s, especially if I can get a pair for $300-$500 less by just waiting a few months.

Time to sell all those unwanted, unloved middly GPU cards we've been hoarding, I think, before the endless barrage of marketing announcements drops their perceived resale value into the junk bin.

[Edit]
And I wanna be able to use the newfangled G-Sync on my awesome-sauce ROG Swift monitor. My current AMD cards do not suffice. (This is what happens when you "future proof" your incremental upgrades on a budget and in stages.)

[More Edit]
And lo and behold - the very next day (uh, today) - AMD reluctantly displayed their new "ultra-enthusiast" R9 390X card.