Last year Nvidia introduced the top-of-the-line GeForce GTX Titan X, a $US1,000 ($1,358) beast of a graphics card that blew just about everything else out of the water. Well forget that old thing. The newly-announced GTX 1080 is nearly twice as powerful for several hundred dollars less.
Nvidia hosted a special event on Twitch last night to unveil the GTX 1080 and the slightly slower, slightly cheaper GTX 1070, a pair of cards designed to demonstrate what the company’s new Pascal architecture can do. As far as gamers are concerned, that can be summed up in a single slide from the presentation.
Note the relatively low performance of Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.
A similar chart from the 1080’s page on Nvidia’s website shows an even more impressive jump over the previous best in GPU.
Why the disparity? I am guessing someone got the scale wrong on one slide or the other. We’ll know for sure once the cards start getting into the hands of benchmarking experts later this month.
What’s most impressive about the new cards isn’t the billions of dollars Nvidia sunk into research and development, the faster faster type of graphics card memory being utilised (GDDR5X) or the smaller 16nm FinFET chip that uses less power and produces less heat. It’s the price of the damn things.
The GTX 1080 is more powerful than a Titan X and at least $US400 ($543) less. It’s supposedly more powerful than two GeForce GTX 980 cards, one of which currently runs around $US600 ($815). I say currently because there’s no real reason to keep those two cards at those prices once these hit the market later this month.
Here’s the 1070, which is coming June 10.
You can read all about the new cards and other things Nvidia got all excited about over at the company’s website.
Good news for folks who were saving up for a GeForce Titan X, right? If you were halfway there, you’re almost at a better place. And if you’re a retailer sitting on a stack of Titan X and GTX 980 cards, whoops
Comments
14 responses to “Nvidia’s Latest ‘Most Advanced Graphics Card’ Is Faster And Cheaper Than The Last One”
This is what iv been saving up for, 2x 1070 for yummy VR goodness 😀
Sli has been traditionally terribad for VR, just a warning.
no issues so far
Its always a issue to get them working in all the games correctly. Crossfire was terrible to get working in Witcher3/warthunder/skyrim…and so on…., it would work and turn off mid-game resulting in bad frame rate drop.
I heard SLi is meant to be worse? Think I will always stick to the single card solution, until Vulkan and DX12 mGPU modes become the norm (probably 5 years time).
Im aware of some common pitfalls of SLI, I have enough knowledge to fix breaks if required but in saying that, no issues so far
It’s all well and good regurgitating nVidia’s press release that the GTX 1080 is twice as powerful as it’s predecessor, but until we see in-game performance numbers those statements are just the usual marketing bullshit.
I can provide a near 100% guarantee that the performance won’t be twice that of the GTX 980 or the Titan X.
Yep, highly doubtful the 1080 will be 2x, or even 1.5x faster than the titan x in conventional games.
Yes, It’s slightly tricky wording here. In the key note Huang talks about the 1080 being faster than 980’s in SLI. The 2nd 980 in an SLI setup isn’t giving the same performance of the 1st one. The performance from the 2nd 980 scales down. The exact amount varies from game to game based on driver optimisation etc etc. Seen a few articles since this release getting this confused. Stating 2 x the performance of a 980…
I also question the comment “cheaper than the last one”. The 1080 isn’t slotted as a replacement for the Titan X… from a model hierarchy point of view. Surely by naming structure it replaces the 980 (although nVidia have been a bit shady in the past on this too).
As with any big tech release…be prepared to pick through the blogs and posts for actual info!
Let’s wait for independent testing!
One y axis reads “relative VR gaming performance” and the other is overall performance. They’re not the same graph.
The disparity is due to the 1080 running the new VR API which only renders detail at the centre of the screen, and drastically less detail as you get to the edges, and the Titan X is not running that API.
On the standard performance, running the same code, the 1080 looks to be around 20-25% faster than the Titan X, which is no slouch, but sure isn’t anything like twice as fast.
The power draw is the big thing, I can slap a pair of 1080s in my machine to replace the single Titan X and not have power or heat worries, I use my card for compute, not gaming, and these are a good price for an 8GB card with more compute power than the Titan X.
Don’t get me wrong – it’s great if they are offering a card with more power than a Titan X for less money, but it’s not as though you are comparing apples to apples. There could well be another ‘ti’ and/or ‘titan’ coming for this generation as well, along with it’s expected markup in price. I’m almost positive that if a 1080ti came out, or another Titan, they would cost even more than their current counterparts (and those prices make me shudder by the time they hit Australian shores).
Looking forward to the 1060, 1050 & also AMD’s offerings.
Can’t wait for the Titan version of the pascal, gonna be SILLAY!
Want to get a 1080 for my 4k setup, still skeptical about the founders edition value, sounds like they are not even hand picking more OC’able cards? just struggling to understand the $100usd price tag above the normal card. Guess I will need to wait for all those reviews about it.
Also for people not understanding why VR performance is claimed to be better, the reason for it is NVIDIA have developed a way to render essentially 2 VR frames in 1, traditional stereoscopic methods required double rendering paths to achieve their goal! I.E. Nvidia here is getting 2 frames for the price of 1, you git it?