NVIDIA may have been slow to react to AMD’s call on the desktop GPU competition, but at long last the company has finally launched the successor to the already two year old GTX 980 GPU, the all new Pascal architecture GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 is now officially the company’s fastest and best desktop GPUs ever made, the GTX 1080 delivers double the performance of a single GTX 980 and is fabricated on a faster and much efficient 16nm FinFET process, it is also the first GPU that utilizes the latest GDDR5X VRAM from Micron.
In NVIDIA’s keynote, CEO Jen Hsun Huang has presented that the reference GTX 1080 is in fact faster than a TITAN X and dual SLI GTX 980 GPU, modern games will now perform 1.6x times faster than the old Maxwell GPUs and users will also notice a significant performance boost in VR gaming. The GTX 1080 has a core frequency of 1607MHz, memory clock speed of 1733MHz, and will merely draw 180W of power from a single 8-pin connector, this makes it currently the most power efficient GPU with no compromises in gaming performance, meanwhile it would also mean that you can easily SLI the GTX 1080 and overclock it without worrying too much about power consumption.
NVIDIA certainly didn’t just improve the performance of its new GPUs, but the company also introduced “Simultaneous Multi Projection Technology”, a feature that allows the new Pascal GeForce cards to be able to create different viewpoints of the same virtual reality scene with decreased performance hit, it tends to deliver a smoother frame rate in VR applications which reduces dizziness when viewing from a VR headset, NVIDIA’s VR demo also showed a significant increase in frame rates from 66 fps to 96fps with this feature activated. While the company didn’t specify which VR headset would benefit from this technology, we are assuming on our side that a NVIDIA made VR headset could be in the works within the company’s lab.
Probably the most exciting part of the annoucement would be both the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070’s price tag, which will retail at $599 (MYR 2,395) and $379 (MYR 1,515) respectively, the latter seems like a pretty good price point for many gamers out there and I certainly can’t wait to purchase one to upgrade my old dated GTX 780. Meanwhile, stay tuned for our hands on with the new GeForce GTX 1080 in the coming weeks as we’ll be heading off to a regional press conference happening in Thailand soon.