Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang appeared on stage at a Game Developer Conference presentation from Epic Games and surpsised everyone with the announcement of the new flagship GeForce Titan X graphics card. Weta Digital, Epic Games, Oculus and NVIDIA unveiled this morning a virtual reality experience called "Thief in the Shadows." Epic’s CEO and founder Tim Sweeney said that the new VR experience is so powerful that it requires a new graphics solution with unprecedented capabilities that aren’t currently available.

"It’s the most advanced GPU the world has ever seen," responded Nvidia Jen-Hsun, as he appeared on stage and presented Tim with the very first production unit of the Nvidia Titan X graphics card, set for release in 2016. "We have launched the most advanced GPU ever but and [given] the first one to Tim Sweeney," Huang added. After announcing the Titan X and some of its specs, Huang autographed the massive GPU and just left the stage.

According to what we know so far, the Titan X GPU packs eight billion transistors and a massive 12GB frame buffer. It will be even faster than the GeForce Titan Z, a $3,000 graphics card which Nvidia launched last March. That card included 5,760 CUDA cores with two Kepler cores inside of it, 12GB of memory, and 8 teraflops of computing power.

More details about the new GeForce Titan X will be shared at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference on March 17.

Ragarding the VR demo, "Thief in the Shadows" was created by the Weta Digital talent behind the Hobbit movies. The virtual reality experience runs exclusively on Oculus’s "Crescent Bay" prototype, leveraging the muscle of a TITAN X GPU to deliver the experience at a smooth 90 frames per second.

In "Thief in the Shadows" will also feature sound thanks to the demo’s spatial audio effects Epic integrated into the experience and driven by the Oculus Audio SDK.