Yesterday, Nvidia revealed their new Pascal series GPUs, the GTX 1080 and the GTX 1070. These two GPUs are surprisingly fast (Nvidia claimed). Without further ado, let’s just cut straight to the chase!
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 – The mighty pixel shredder!
The first higher-end GPU is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080. This guy has some muscles! With whopping 8 Gigabytes of GDDR5X memory, 9TFLOPS and 2560 CUDA cores, the GTX 1080 is a serious performer. Nvidia claims that the GTX 1080 is around 30% faster than the Titan X (sorry, Titan X owners). While that’s sad for those using 980Tis and Titan Xs, it is a huge leap forward, thanks to the 14nm FinFET architecture. The Titan X does 7TFLOPS, while the 1080 does 9. Holy Cow!
Nvidia even claims that the GTX 1080 is faster than 2 GTX 980s! The older cards are gonna heavily drop in value, that will result in a hefty loss to the owners of Titan X and 980s, who bought them for $1000+ and $500+ respectively.
So yeah, everything is good, but what about the value? The GTX 1080 will cost $600 at launch on 27th May, 2016. The price is pretty good too, considering the performance this GPU has to offer.
About thermals, this GPU reached a maximum of 63C on full load, on stock reference cooler. It’s highly efficient. While it’s TDP is great than the GTX 980, it is still better in thermals and require only one 8-PIN PCIe power connector from the PSU.
Nvidia didn’t talk about the clock speeds, but they did show an overclocked GTX 1080 running at 2.1MHz on core and the GDDR5X memory running at 11GHz! Whoa..
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 – The new price/performance king?
The GTX 1070 on the other hand, is also expected to beat the Titan X at a price of $380! It will feature 8GB of GDDR5 VRAM. It will probably be clocked at 7GHz, like the GTX 970/980. But there is no memory segmentation dilemma here, you will get full 8GB VRAM. Looks like Nvidia has learned from their mistakes. The bus size is expected to be 256-bit. The GTX 1070 will do 6.5TFLOPS, very close to the 7TFLOPS of GTX Titan X. The price, as said above, will be $380. The GTX 1070 will hit the markets on June 10th, 2016.
Nvidia Pascal – What else it has to offer?
Well, the treat doesn’t stop here. With Nvidia Pascal, you get some nice technologies too, the best of which is the Nvidia ANSEL. Read more about ANSEL here. Other than that, you get a very efficient GPU which has revolutionary architecture and performance. The 14nm FinFET technology is definitely a game changer.
A close look at the new cooler design:
Taking a look at the cooler, Nvidia hasn’t done much, apart from some styling. The cooler features the standard vapor chamber cooling system with a blower-style fan. This setup is ideal for multi-GPU configurations and compact PC builds. The GPUs also feature a full-cover backplate.
The beast in action:
Nvidia also had some rigs to show-off after the reveal. The rig above features 2 GTX 1080s in SLI. Just look at that SLI bridge! Also, the GPUs are back-plated, and they look great!
Time for some numbers:
Taking a look at the graph above, provided by Nvidia, we can see that the GTX 1080 is on a whole new level. Absolutely demolishing the old Maxwell GPUs, in both performance and thermals.
Well, that’s all we know about the Pascal GPUs until now. More details will be out soon. Desperately waiting for something from AMD too. A competition will definitely spice-up the game.
