It’s finally here: Nvidia’s newest “kings“, the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. The company dubs its newest Pascal-based graphics cards as the “most efficient and advanced” graphics card it has ever made. In addition, Nvidia’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, mentioned that the R&D that went into making the consumer-grade Pascal graphics cards amounted to “billions of dollars” –  talk about GPU investments.
During Nvidia’s launch event earlier today, the company demonstrated the capabilities of GTX 1080 by using Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, Rise Of The Tomb Raider and Tom Clancy’s The Division with all three games graphics settings set to max and a refresh rate of 60Hz. Nvidia did not mention the actual framerates of the three demos, but judging from the webcast, it’s likely to be at least 60fps.
When running a real-time render of in-game models for an upcoming MOBA by Epic Games, Nvidia also mentioned several key specifications of the GTX 1080. Specifically, the GPU and memory clocks was recorded at 2,114MHz and 5,508MHz respectively, while the GPU temperature was at 60°C – all of which resulted in a smooth 60fps.
The company also claimed that GTX 1080 was able to reach 9 TFLOPS of single-precision performance and can be overclocked to more than 2GHz.
Built using 16nm FinFet GPU manufacturing process with transistors count of 7.2 billion, other specifications of the GTX 1080 include: 2,560 cores, 8GB GDDR5X memory (8GB GDDR5 for the GTX 1070), 10Gbps Quad Data Rate, vapour chamber cooling, and an overall new design.  It also contains three DisplayPort 1.4 ports alongside a HDMI 2.0, and dual link DVI port.
Amazingly, the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 is said to best even the GTX Titan X. Nvidia mentioned that with the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, consumers will be greeted with up to twice the performance and three times more energy efficiency compared to the Titan X.
Now, let’s talk about price. If one were to wind back about a year ago, the mighty GTX Titan X had a launch price of US$999 – sold in Malaysia for about RM4,500. Considering the fact that the performance of GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 best even that of the Titan X, their respective retail price should be almost similar or higher right?
Wrong. Nvidia has announced that the GTX 1080 will be priced at a mouth-watering price of just US$599 (about RM2,359) and the “Founders Edition” will be priced at US$699 (around RM2,795). Meanwhile, the GTX 1070 will retail for a price of US$379 (approximately RM1,515) and US$449 (about RM1,795) for the Founders Edition.
According to Nvidia, the date of availability for the GTX 1080 will be on the 27th of May, while the GTX 1070 will be available on the 10th of June. For more information on the new GTX 1080, head on to Nvidia’s official website.
