Nvidia Lifts The Veil On ‘GTX 1080’ – ‘Irresponsible Amounts Of Performance’ Per Nvidia CEO


At Dreamhack in Austin, Texas, this past weekend, Nvidia finally lifted the veil on their upcoming leap in graphics card technology, dubbed the GTX 1080. Running off their new Pascal architecture, the GTX 1080 aims to be the pinnacle of graphics card performance.

According to the website, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 is the “most advanced gaming graphics card ever created.” According to Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, this was the most expensive “GPU endeavor in the history of humanity.” He jokingly made the comment that you likely could have “gone to Mars”, since the R&D budget was in the billions. Yes, billions with a “B.”

“The 1080 is insane. It’s almost irresponsible amounts of performance,” Huang stated during the Dreamhack Austin event on May 6. And if the graphs he brought to light are to be taken completely to heart, he’s not boasting. The GTX 1080 looks to sit comfortably above the current kings of the GPU revolution — the Nvidia Maxwell series such as the GTX 980, 980 ti and Titan X — and at a fraction of the power consumption.

What the GTX 1080 boasts is power akin to the current king of consumer graphics cards – the Nvidia Titan X. The Titan X currently sits around $1100 on Newegg and currently is one of the fastest cards on the market. Nvidia claims that the GTX 1080 much faster than the GTX Titan X and is around $500 cheaper. While we need real-world benchmarks to prove or disprove Nvidia’s claims, it’s impressive nonetheless. Bethesda’s Doom was shown running on the new card as well as the API, Vulkan, and while VSync was turned off the game shot up to around 200 frames-per-second while running fully maxed out at 1080p (and it was only shown at 1080p thanks to it being the max resolution of the projector they were utilizing for the demo).

Pascal is the architecture at the core of the GTX 1080, and it’s what Jen-Hsun said took his team of engineers two years to create. Nvidia describes Pascal as the “world’s most advanced GPU architecture, delivering truly game-changing performance, innovative technologies and immersive, next-gen VR.” Rival AMD has a new GPU architecture of their own, Polaris, and the onus is squarely on them to deliver a cost-effective, yet performance equal product. Especially since Nvidia dropped a bombshell at the event and unveiled a second card running off Pascal — the GTX 1070.

GTX 1070 Nvidia
Specs and price for the GeForce GTX 1070. [Image via Nvidia]
Left for last, and more so as a “one-more-thing, mic-drop” type situation, the GTX 1070 aims to be the card to take the place of the GTX 970, currently the best performing card at one of the best price points. The GTX 1070 also boasts performance better than a Titan X, again a card that runs around or over a thousand dollars, and the 1070 only costs $379. What this does as well is create a lower barrier of entry for anyone looking for a powerful, entry-level VR graphics card, as the GTX 1070 will most definitely be able to do anything with Virtual Reality. VR-expert Jason Evangelho in an article for UploadVR speculated that the 1070 is just the beginning as well, and that we may yet see even more cost-effective cards hit the market like we saw with the 900 series. This means that the cost-of-entry for VR is getting cheaper within the first year of VR really being consumer-available, which is a very good thing for the growth of that industry.

With the GTX 1080 and 1070 sitting comfortably at an extremely affordable price point, it also needs to be pointed out that come June 10 you can buy a graphics card on the market that can, theoretically if Nvidia’s statistics can be taken at face value, play games at 4k resolutions with super high frame-rate for the same price as the current console kingpin, the PlayStation 4. This is especially relevant since the PlayStation NEO is theoretically supposed to give better performance than the regular PlayStation 4, and even that will pale in comparison to the new entry-level card in Nvidia’s flagship series – and it will likely cost more than the 1070 to purchase.

It’ll be interesting to see how the GTX 1080 and 1070 stack up moving forward. The GTX 1080 will be released on May 27 for $599, while the GTX 1070 will be released on June 10 for $379. If you’ve been looking for a new graphics card to power up your rig, you may not need to look much further than these two.

[Images via Nvidia]

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