Nvidia's next major graphics card, the Titan X, saw a surprise unveiling at GDC 2015, Digital Spy reports.

Usually ear-marked for the GPU Technology Conference - which will begin on March 17 - the firm's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed the card at Epic Games' annual 'State of Unreal' press conference.

Described as "the most advanced GPU the world has ever seen", the Titan X features a 16GB frame buffer - double that of last year's Titan Black - and 8 billion transistors, while it took several thousand man hours to create.

Release date or pricing for the Titan X have yet to be revealed.

The announcement was made off the back of Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney's comments at the conference that the future of virtual reality demands more powerful graphics processing.

"We have very powerful VR devices, we have very powerful game engines, such as Unreal Engine 4, making it all possible. But what we really need now is a series of leaps and bounds in graphics technology," he told press including Digital Spy.

"We need faster GPUs. With faster GPUs we can render more realistic scenes, we can render at higher frame rates - there are lots of amazing things that we will be able to do.

"But a leap in major GPU performance is required. This is a topic that we at Epic have been thinking about a lot."

Earlier this week Nvidia unveiled new Android-powered Shield hardware for the living room, which would support 4K video playback and a new 1080p game streaming service.

Meanwhile, Sony revealed its virtual reality device Project Morpheus would debut in the first half of 2016.