NVIDIA at GDC: GTX 1080 Ti, price cuts and more

When the Titan X Pascal launched back in August of last year, we all knew that there would inevitably be a cheaper, GeForce variant of the powerful GP102 chip. Today, at their GDC event, NVIDIA officially announced the latest and greatest entrant to the GeForce lineup; the GTX 1080 Ti.  Based on the same GP102 architecture with 12 billion transistors as the Titan X Pascal, the GTX 1080 Ti takes that mighty performance and attaches a much more wallet friendly price tag of $699. The new card features higher clocks speeds than the Titan X, with a rated boost clock of 1582 MHz.

The 1080 Ti uses the familiar 10 series shroud design

A new GeForce king, the mighty 1080 Ti

With the GTX 1080 Ti, NVIDIA is doing away with the DVI connector, presumably to increase airflow to the card’s blower. In addition to this, the card features an improved heatsink design with a vapour chamber for increased cooling capacity. The remaining display outputs are similar to other cards in the 10 series; featuring a HDMI 2.0 connector and three display port 1.4-ready connectors. Power is provided through an 8-pin and 6-pin connector, which provides the card’s 250Ws of juice.

At 352-bits wide, NVIDIA has decided to disable a 32-bit channel on the GP102’s memory interface, allowing for 11GB of VRAM. This is likely to differentiate the card from the Titan’s 12 GB, but the faster GDDR5X makes up the extra bandwidth. With this, 8 ROPs are also disabled, dropping the count from the full 96 to 88.  Hooked up to this bus interface is an impressive 11GB of GDDR5X memory, operating at 11Gbps. This is faster than the memory first introduced with the GTX 1080, and used on the Titan X Pascal. This increase in transfer rate actually gives the GTX 1080 Ti slightly more bandwidth than the Titan X Pascal; at 484GB/s compared to 480GB/s.

A simplified Block Diagram of the GP102 chip powering the GTX 1080 Ti

Some new features

NVIDIA is also introducing some new features with the GTX 1080 Ti.

NVIDIA Aftermath

NVIDIA is introducing a tool that will apparently help identify what caused GPU crashing.

Gameworks will now support DX12

Price cuts and memory speed increases

In addition to announcing the new performance champ for the GeForce lineup, NVIDIA is also announcing price cuts to the existing cards in the 10 series. The GTX 1080 is being discounted from $599 to $499, and the already well-priced GTX 1070 is being cut from $379 to $349. The Founder Editions of these cards are being reduced from $699 to $549 and $449 to $399, respectively.

But it’s not just price cuts that the existing cards are receiving. NVIDIA has also decided to give the GTX 1080 and GTX 1060 a slight upgrade in the form of a memory speed bump. The new boards will feature increased clocks, presumably available to partners to sell as factory OCs. The GTX 1080 is receiving new GDDR5X modules capable of 11 Gbps, up from 10. The GTX 1060 is also getting a 1 Gbps bump from 8 to 9 Gbps using standard GDDR5 modules. These increases will help to provide a slight performance improvement for these cards.