Just a few hours after AMD’s VEGA announcement at GDC 2017, it was NVIDIA’s turn to announce the biggest and baddest graphics card from their stables. The NVIDIA live stream was a bit of a pain to watch with numerous hiccups and with one service even dying mid-stream (we’re looking at you Twitch) but finally, we saw it happen. Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO, NVIDIA stepped onto the stage to elaborate upon all the innovation NVIDIA was doing to help the entertainment industry to render movies faster and with higher complexity. And then unveiled the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti which is reportedly 35% faster out of the box than a 1080 and faster than Titan X thanks to its overclocking potential.
The new graphics card from NVIDIA will have 12 Billion transistors and have a 1.6 GHz boost clock. As with the GTX 1080, it will be able to hit 2 GHz on the stock cooling provided you get lucky with the silicon. NVIDIA has picked the GP102 GPU for the 1080 Ti. Packed with 3584 CUDA cores, 224 Texture Mapping Units, and 88 ROPs, if we are to compare the 1080 Ti vs Titan X then it is slightly behind the TITAN X. The Titan X has more ROPs and 1 GB greater GDDR5X VRAM.
And since ROPs have been cut, the memory bus width is also lower on the GTX 1080 Ti which comes down to a 352-bit bus with a 10008 MHz clock. The good thing is that the TDP is also lower than the Titan X, a good 30 W lower at 220W. All of these are going to be squeezed into 6 GPCs. The surprising part was that NVIDIA hasn’t revealed the base clock yet. Which we’re assuming will be between what the TITAN X and 1080 are clocked at. So expect something between 1417MHz to 1607MHz.
You’re obviously wondering how well the performance will be of the 1080 ti vs VEGA, and so are we. NVIDIA, again, did not show any benchmark numbers but simply had a slide showing memory usage made possible. The GTX 1080 Ti is designed to handle AAA games at 5K resolution. Watch Dogs 2 running at 5K resolution can reference that kind of memory and the same goes for the newest Deus Ex video game.
As for the NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti release date, well, it’s happening next week.
Given how Intel just dropped the price across its entire portfolio after AMD revealed VEGA, we were expecting NVIDIA to do something similar after the VEGA announcement and they have. Here’s a card which is slightly lower than the Titan X in terms of specs so a near-$1000 price tag was inevitable but we believe it’s because of the looming threat for AMD that NVIDIA decided to announce the GTX 1080 Ti with a price tag of $699. Competition is good!