Gamers rejoice, for the new top graphic card is here. Nvidia has upped its game again, announcing two cards called the GTX 1080 and the 1070, though, it is the former which will inevitably get more attention. They are the first cards to fall under the ’10 series’ umbrella.
The cards feature the new Pascal microarchitecture of Nvidia and come after Nvidia has spent “several billion dollars” on research over the past few years. “It’s almost irresponsible amounts of performance,” as Nvidia puts.
As you’d expect, the card is around and around specs-galore. For one, it brings 2 times the performance, and 3 times the efficiency of the $1000 Titan X. It is faster than two GTX 980s running in SLI. These figures are not contentious as Doom was made to run at up to 200fps at 1080p during demo!
Not all specifications are out, but the card is built on a 16nm FinFET chip, a two-generation technological leap from 28nm, 2560 CUDA cores, a 256-bit memory bus, 320 GB/s memory bandwidth and brings 8 GB of new Micron GDDR5X VRAM with 10Gbps memory pipe. Performance will stand at around 9 TFLOPS from its 7.2 billion transistors.
Thanks to the efficiency Pascal has brought over Maxwell, the clock speeds have also risen to as much as 2144 MH but running at a temperature of 67 degree centigrade. The 1080 can run on just 180W of power with a single 8-pin connector.
There’ll be added benefits for VR with features like VR Works Audio, VR PhysX and VR Touch. There’s also the Simultaneous Multi-Projection and Ansel. The 1070 is no slouch either, with performance of up to 6.5 TFLOPS with its 7.2 billion transistors, 8 GB GDDR5 RAM and the same 16nm FinFET manufacturing procedure.
The new cards come with a new fan design, replacing the one introduced back in 2013. It now uses vapor chamber cooling for a more silent profile. Ports for the card include 1 DL-DVI-D port, 1 HDMI port and 3 DisplayPorts 1.2.
Despite being more powerful than anything on the market, the card won’t cost a ridiculous figure. Compared to the $1000 Titan X, the new GTX 1080 will retail at $599. The GTX 1080 will cost $379. Both will have special “Foundation Edition” cards (which is essentially a newer, fancier name for reference cards), costing $699 and $449 respectively.
That price is $50 costlier than the cards they replace but for the kind of performance boost on show here, it is clear that the difference is more than made up here.