After much speculation, Nvidia, have revealed their first Pascal architecture cards, The GTX 1080, and GTX 1070 and they don’t come cheap either. The 1080 will retail at $599 and 1070 will retail at $379, these are exactly $50 more than their individual predecessor cards, the GTX 980 and 970 when it retailed. The 1080 will release on the 27th of May and the 1070 on the 10th of June. Nvidia is also pushing the promise that the 1000 series cards will set new bars on performance and power. Of course, like the previous cards, the 1080 is the ultimate in their flagship while the 1070 is and enthusiast targeted gpu.
Let’s talk about Pascal
The increased performance comes from its new Pascal chipset and to keep things simple as we do here on AbsoluteGeeks, Pascal is possible with a better and leaner transistor tech from industry maker TSMC. the new GPU has a 16 nm FinFET microarchitecture means you get a better card. The 1080 also has micron GDDR5X memory so you’ll have a 10 Gbps memory clock. The 1070 will retain the standard GDDR5 memory. While the full extent of technical specs aren’t out, they’ll be out later this month before retail. To compare, the GTX 1080 will push 9 TFLOPS performance from a smaller chip. This beats the Titan X which does 7 TFLOPs. The 1070 is stated to push out around 6,5 TFLOPS. Here’s the spec sheet. Nvidia’s CEO, Jen-Husn Huang put it quite eloquently which you can see below.
“The GTX 1080 is the “largest GPU endeavor, largest chip endeavor, largest processor endeavor, in the history of humanity,” NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.
"The GeForce GTX 1080 is almost irresponsible levels of performance" pic.twitter.com/LdRWMhwGZE
— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) May 7, 2016
To put that in comparison, the GTX 1080 beats the Titan X, nay, hammers it and it’s three time as power efficient. It’s very likely that you won’t be needing a GTX 980 SLI setup anymore with the 1080 around. It’s faster than that too. Huang also added that the R&D budget for the new card was “several billion dollars” over the span of more than two years. “I’m pretty sure you can go to Mars with that”
Nvidia is now calling the 1080, the gamer’s dream card to have. Games such as Paragon, Tomb Raider and The Division were shown at the conference running on full settings at 60 fps in high resolutions using the card. Also on the other side, the 1080 will also offer “simultaneous multi-projection,” which will allow gamers to get the best experience on multiple monitor setups. The card will also render VR better, it boasts a rendering time that’s twice as fast as the Titan X to render out VR using the multi projection feature.
Nvidia is also releasing a special designed “Founders edition” card that will retail at $699 which by the looks of it will include a rad cooler, the founders edition for the GTX 1070 will cost $449. Of course, not to forget mentioning, AMD is also coming out with their own cards with its Polaris tech this year and it looks like all the gamers win. Gaming cards are getting better and they’re getting cheaper.
