NVIDIA had the usual set of sessions at GDC but before all of that, Jen-Sun Huang took to the stage to unveil the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. And tomorrow i.e. March 10th, the GTX 1080 Ti will be available for sale. The GTX 1080 Ti announcement has been awaited for quite some time but AMD’s recent announcement of RX VEGA seems to have caused NVIDIA to act faster. Both the GTX 1080 Ti and AMD RX VEGA were announced at GDC, and we still don’t have pricing information for the RX VEGA but the GTX 1080 Ti will be selling at $599 which was what the GTX 1080 retailed for at launch. This would mean that the price in India for the GTX 1080 Ti will be around Rs. 63,250 which is the same as what the GTX 1080 initially was priced at. There will be a GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition card as well.
Unlike previous flagship ‘Ti’ launches, the 1080 Ti doesn’t make that big of a compromise in terms of specs compared to the TITAN X Pascal. We believe this maybe due to the fact that AMD is coming out with the RX VEGA in a couple of months and given how their Polaris and Ryzen launches have turned out, NVIDIA might have to take a few precautionary measures. The minimal compromise and early launch of the GTX 1080 Ti might be for this very reason. However, all of this is just conjecture and we can only be sure about these things once AMD’s GPU is out.
The GTX 1080 Ti is based off the same GP102 GPU that the GTX TITAN X Pascal card has except for a few changes. The GTX 1080 Ti has 11 GB of VRAM which is 1 GB fewer than the TITAN XP, the memory clock is greater by 1GHz and the core clock is greater by 63 MHz. Here’s the GTX 1080 Ti at a glance.
GTX 1080 Ti Specifications
| GTX 1080 Ti Specifications | |||||
|
| GTX 1080 | GTX 1080 Ti | TITAN X P | GTX 980 | GTX 780 |
| CUDA Cores | 2560 | 3584 | 3584 | 2048 | 2304 |
| Texture Units | NA | 224 | 224 | 128 | 192 |
| ROPs | 64 | 88 | 96 | 64 | 48 |
| Core Clock | 1607 MHz | 1480 MHz | 1417 MHz | 1126 MHz | 863 MHz |
| Boost Clock | 1733MHz | 1582 MHz | 1531 MHz | 1216MHz | 900Mhz |
| TFLOPs (FMA) | 9 TFLOPs | 11.3 TFLOPs | 11 TFLOPs | 5 TFLOPs | 4.1 TFLOPs |
| Memory Clock | 10Gbps GDDR5X | 11 Gbps GDDR5X | 10Gbps GDDR5X | 7Gbps GDDR5 | 6Gbps GDDR5 |
| Memory Bus Width | 256-bit | 352-bit | 384-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| VRAM | 8GB | 11 GB | 12GB | 4GB | 3GB |
| TDP | 180W | 250 W | 250W | 165W | 250W |
| GPU | GP104 | GP102 | GP102 | GM204 | GK110 |
| Transistor Count | 7.2B | 12B | 12B | 5.2B | 7.1B |
| Manufacturing Process | TSMC 16nm | TSMC 16nm | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 28nm |
| Launch Price | $599 | $699 | $999 | $549 | $649 |
Like the GTX 1080, the GTX 1080 Ti also features GDDR5X memory. Except, now NVIDIA claims to use improved modules. The improvement is in the silicon which suffers from reduced signal jitter and noise. This improvement allows for a higher IO speed, 11 GBps to be precise. Compression algorithms which were improved with Maxwell and the initial launch of Pascal get another shot in the arm with the improved GP102.
On top of that, NVIDIA is using a different approach to rendering called tiled rendering. This allows them to make better use of the memory bandwidth. Since the rendering now breaks the entire frame into tiles, the memory allocation for each tile also undergoes a similar fragmentation which is called Tiled Caching. NVIDIA hasn’t done away with the previous approach of immediate rendering, the newer tiled rendering is a minor modification to help reduce bandwidth used for geometry and subsequently save on latency as well.
The benefits of these compression algorithms and newer approach vary across games since a lot has to do with how the developer make use of these features.
At the reveal, Jen-Sun Huang claimed that the GTX 1080 Ti is about 35% better than the GTX 1080. This is quite a lot and given how previous generations have claimed high increments, we don’t expect the overall gains to be more than 25-30%. It’s likely that there will be driver updates in the future that will actually hit the magical 35% figure but at launch this seems like wishful thinking.
Here's how the new GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition Looks like.
We have no official word from NVIDIA regarding the price as of yet. We will update this section as soon as we get the same. However, given that the launch price is the same as the GTX 1080, we expect the GTX 1080 Ti to be priced around Rs.63,250 as well.