Nvidia has launched its long-expected GeForce GTX 1080 Ti video card, its follow-up to the GTX 1080 and Titan X Pascal. While the launch wasn't a surprise thanks to a heap of leaks, its release window and price certainly were: "next week" and $699.
Nvidia claims the GTX 1080 Ti is around 35 percent faster than the GTX 1080, which makes it ever so slightly faster than the £1,100/$1,200 Titan X. That's not surprising considering the 1080 Ti is, for the most part, identical to the Titan X: they both use the same GP102 GPU, with 3,584 stream processors and 224 texture units split across six graphics processing clusters and 28 SMs.
The key difference, and what gives the 1080 Ti a slight edge over the Titan X, is its memory configuration. The 1080 Ti features a rather odd 11GB of GDDR5X memory, which results in a 352-bit memory interface and 88 ROPs instead of the 12GB of GDDR5X, 384-bit interface, and 96 ROPs of the Titan X.
However, the 1080 Ti's memory runs at 11GHz rather than the Titan X's 10GHz, giving the new card slightly higher memory bandwidth at 484GB/s. The GPU boost clock is also a wee bit higher at 1.6GHz, with Nvidia promising 2GHz when overclocked. TDP is rated at 250W with power coming in via 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe connectors.
Other improvements include a better vapour chamber cooler on Founders Edition (read: reference) design cards, which Nvidia claims results in quieter performance. Those Founders Edition cards will be priced the same as partner cards, too, instead of the premium charged for GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 Founders Editions. Founders Edition cards will launch first, with partner cards following at a later date.
Those with more modest budgets will be pleased to hear the memory improvements made to the 1080 Ti are trickling down to the GTX 1080 and GTX 1060. A new, pre-overclocked SKU of the GTX 1080 will feature the same 11GHz memory, while a new GTX 1060 SKU will feature 9GHz memory.
Pricing for the overclocked GTX 1080 and GTX 1060 haven't yet been announced; both are due for release later in the year.
In the mean time, Nvidia says it has dropped the price of the original GTX 1080 to $499. It doesn't look like retailers have yet caught up—the cheapest you can find the GTX 1080 online is still about $590 in the US, or £530 in the UK. We'll check the prices again later today.
