Nvidia’s Titan X graphics chip can render 15M plants in a single scene

That’s a lot of flora.

Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang showed today how the Titan X graphics chip — the fastest the company has ever made — can render 15 million plants in a single scene.

He showed it via a demo running Unreal Engine 4 software from Epic Games. It was a scene with a boy chasing a kite through a valley that measured 100 square miles. That valley was filled with 15 million plants.

“This helps you understand where computer graphics is going, and where we are going,” Huang said. “It takes your breath away. I am amazed by it.”

Huang said the Titan X, which was first shown at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, has 8 billion transistors, compared to 4 million transistors in Nvidia’s first Riva 128 graphics chip in the 1990s.

“It’s the most advanced GPU we’ve ever created,” he said.

The chip has 3,072 CUDA cores and can process 7 teraflops. It has 12GB of graphics memory and sells starting today for $1,000.