Tech

Nvidia’s GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 revealed: Faster than Titan X at half the price

GTX 1080 will cost $599 and launch May 27, with GTX 1070 following June 10 for $379.

Mark Walton – May 6, 2016 11:59 pm | 225

Updated, June 10: As of 2pm BST today you can buy the GTX 1070 Founders Edition for £399/$449 directly from Nvidia.com, or from your choice of component retailer (Scan, Newegg, etc.)

The cheaper partner-made GTX 1070 cards are up for pre-order, priced at around £330-£350. Scan is reporting that the cheaper GTX 1070 cards will be available from June 13, but we haven't confirmed that they will be sent out then.

Read our full review of the GTX 1070.

Updated, May 27: As of 2pm BST today you can buy the GTX 1080. You can pick up a Founders Edition GTX 1080 directly from Nvidia.com for £619 in the UK, or Scan will sell you a Founders Edition GTX 1080 for exactly the same price. Curiously, all of the usual third parties (MSI, EVGA, Gigabyte, etc.) are selling the same Founders Edition card at the same £619 price.

Original story

Nvidia has unveiled the pricing, hardware specs, and release date for the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 graphics cards. The company has also attempted to clarify why the Founders Edition cards are so much more expensive than their normal OEM counterparts.

OEM versions of the GTX 1080 will retail for $599 in the US (about £450 in the UK), $50/£30 more than the GTX 980 cost at launch. Its smaller sibling, the GTX 1070, will cost $380 (around £330 in the UK), again a significant chunk more than the previous-gen GTX 970. Both of the cards will use Nvidia's Pascal GPU microarchitecture.

The GTX 1080 will go on sale worldwide on May 27, and the GTX 1070 on June 10. These should be the true release dates and not some kind of "paper launch": Nvidia is in full production for the GP104 GPU that powers both cards, and we've learnt that Micron is full steam ahead with the GDDR5X memory on the GTX 1080. While you wait for launch day, go and read our full review of the GTX 1080—its performance is truly superb.

GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 Founders Edition

With the release of the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, Nvidia is trying something slightly different by selling "Founders Edition" cards directly from Nvidia.com.

These cards are significantly more expensive than cards sold by third-party OEMs such as Asus and MSI: the Founders Edition GTX 1080 will be £619 in the UK and $699 in the US; the Founders Edition GTX 1070 will be £399 in the UK and $449 in the US.

What extras do you get from a Founders Edition card? Except for the funky new faceted cooler design (as seen in the gallery below), not much. Nvidia says the Founders Edition cards have an upgraded five-phase power supply that, in theory, could make for more solid overclocks. The PCB has also been optimised "for low impedance."

GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 hardware specs

While it's surprising Nvidia has raised the price of its flagship graphics cards—particularly given AMD's bold claims that its Polaris architecture will offer VR-ready performance at a "mainstream" price point—the company claims that both cards are significantly faster than its current flagships, the GTX Titan X and GTX 980 Ti, which retail for $1000 (£800) and $650 (£550) respectively. In the case of the GTX 1080, Nvidia claims it's twice as fast as the Titan X in certain VR applications and three times as energy efficient—it even says it's faster than dual-SLI 980 setup. (But curiously, you can only run the GTX 1080 and 1070 in two-way SLI; three- and four-way SLI are not available.)

The performance boost comes from the combination of a new GPU microarchitecture (Pascal) with a leaner TSMC 16nm FinFET manufacturing process and much higher clock speeds: 1607MHz (1733MHz boost) for the GTX 1080 vs. 1000MHz (1050MHz boost) for the Titan X.

The GTX 1080 also makes use of faster Micron GDDR5X memory. With a clock speed of 10,000MHz and a 256-bit-wide bus, there's 320GB/s of memory bandwidth available. Meanwhile, the GTX 1070 will use standard GDDR5 memory.

The GP104 GPU, which helms both the GTX 1080 and 1070, shares many features with its Maxwell-based predecessor. The key difference that each Graphics Processing Cluster (GPC) now has 10 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) instead of eight. Each SM contains 128 CUDA cores, 48KB of L1 cache, and eight texture units. All told, this means the GTX 1080 has 2560 CUDA cores, 64 ROPs, and 160 texture units.

Updated, October 18: Nvidia has just unveiled the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti, priced very aggressively and released on October 25.

Nvidia confirmed that the GTX 1080 will push around 9 TFLOPS of (likely single-precision floating point) performance from a chip built around 7.2 billion transistors. By comparison the Titan X pushes around 7 TFLOPS from its 8 billion transistors. The GTX 1070 is said to push 6.5 TFLOPS. Full tech specs for the GTX 1080 can be found in our review of the card.

Nvidia has also finally updated its stock cooler design, which debuted with the GTX Titan back in 2013. It is, as the leaks suggested, a metallic shroud with a striking angular design that sports a single cooling fan in a blower design at the rear. Alongside the new cooler, Nvidia claims that it has improved power delivery too (120mV peak-to-peak), allowing for more stable overclocking.

Temperature-wise, and despite the higher clock speeds, the GTX 1080 remains reasonably cool. At stock clock and fan speeds, our review sample (in a case) hit 76 degrees Celsius, bashing up against the temperature target of 84 degrees with an overclock in place.

The new cooler will only feature on "Founders Edition" cards bought directly from Nvidia.com.

But wait, there's more!

In addition to the new hardware, Nvidia took the wraps off three new software features, starting with Ansel, a sophisticated tool for taking in-game screenshots. Unlike typical screenshot tools, Ansel hooks directly into the game engine—developer permitting—allowing users to free-roam around a specific scene, rotating the image, cropping it, and applying filters. Even better, because the tool ties directly into the frame buffer, users can take screenshots at resolutions higher than their monitor, up to a Photoshop-busting 61,000 pixels wide. There's even a mode to take 360-degree screenshots for viewing in VR headsets like the HTC Vive, or via the Nvidia Android app and a Google Cardboard. Games supporting Ansel at launch include The Division, The Witcher 3, and No Man's Sky.

Nvidia also had two enhancements for virtual reality: Nvidia VR Works Audio, and the wonderfully wordy "Simultaneous Multi-Projection." The former is effectively ray-tracing for audio, allowing developers to physically model audio as it bounces off of different surfaces, allowing for realistic reverberation amongst other effects. To showcase VR Works Audio, Nvidia is releasing a free collection of minigames, dubbed The Nvidia VR Funhouse for the HTC Vive.

Meanwhile, Simultaneous Multi-Projection is a new rendering pipeline for Pascal cards that allows them to render 16 independent "viewpoints" in a single rendering pass. In a regular graphics card, a single viewpoint—i.e. what a user sees on a monitor—is rendered in one pass. That's fine for most applications, but problems occur with multi-monitor setups and VR. In a triple monitor setup where a users curves the monitors, the graphics card can only render a single viewpoint, where it assumes all the monitors are arranged in a straight line, resulting in the images on the left and right monitors looking warped.

Traditionally, this problem is solved by using three separate graphics cards in supported games, but with Multi-Projection, the single GPU can render three different viewpoints, with two of them correcting the distortion. The company uses a similar technique to speed up VR rendering, allowing for a stereo image to be rendered in a single pass, dramatically improving the frame rate—a particularly big problem to solve when VR needs to run at a hefty 90 FPS.

While Nvidia is the first to reveal next-generation graphics cards, AMD is rumoured to be to taking the wraps off its Polaris architecture in the next few weeks. While it's highly unlikely that Polaris will topple the performance of Nvidia's latest, if AMD delivers on its promises of VR-ready (or better) performance at a mainstream price point, at the very least consumers will have an affordable alternative to the Nvidia juggernaut.

Note: this story has been updated with more information about the Founders Edition cards and the hardware specs of the GTX 1080.

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Mark Walton Consumer Editor

Mark is Consumer Editor at Ars Technica UK by day, and keen musician by night. He hails from the UK, the home of ARM, heavy metal, and superior chocolate.

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