The role of Senior Marketing Manager – GeForce, Gamer Loyalty & Advocacy, was listed by Nvidia on LinkedIn (via PCWorld) and it contains references to promotion strategy for GTX 1080 Ti pre-orders.
If you want to play 4K games without juddering framerates, and without mucking around with multi-GPU tech, there’s nothing out there to match it.The highly anticipated Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card has been confirmed to be on the way in a recent company job listing. Clearly, the Pascal core offers a significant step up from the best Maxwell chips in terms of both performance and power efficiency. The GeForce GTX 1080 is a phenomenal technical achievement. It’s remarkable to see such a jump in performance accompanied by a big drop in power consumption. By comparison, the same system with a GeForce GTX 980 Ti at stock speed drew 386W with an AMD Radeon R9 Fury X installed it hit 412W. Impressively, while all this was going on, the total system power consumption (measured when running Unigine Valley) was just 306W. Again, the only outlier was Fallout 4, and even that game remained playable at Ultra settings – a result we’ve never seen before from a single GPU. Nor did the extremely demanding Crysis 3 faze the GTX 1080: with Very High detail, its minimum framerate was 37fps. To see how far we could push it, we then switched The Witcher 3 to Ultra settings with HairWorks enabled: even then the GTX 1080 didn’t dip below 30fps.
In all our standard tests it stayed comfortably above 30fps, with a stunning minimum of 50fps in Doom at Ultra settings, and 43fps in The Witcher 3 at High detail. It’s when you switch to 4K resolution that the GTX 1080 really shows off its power. The exception was Fallout 4 at 2,560 x 1,440, but even then, the minimum of 56fps was very smooth.īut let’s face it, you’re not going to buy a GTX 1080 for gaming at these resolutions.
It goes without saying that 1080p gaming is no problem for this card: even at 2,560 x 1,440, the GTX 1080 almost never dropped below 60fps in our test games. So, on to the big question: just how fast is the GTX 1080? The answer, as you’d probably guessed, is very fast. The GTX 1080 also supports hardware HEVC decode, which helps out with streaming 4K content from Netflix and other services.
That’s enough colour depth for full HDR imagery on a compatible TV or monitor. This provides more display bandwidth than HDMI 2, which enables you to display full 10-bit colour at 4K with a 60Hz refresh rate. To make use of it you’ll need a new SLI HB (high-bandwidth) bridge: you can still use an old SLI bridge to connect two cards, but you won’t get the full performance benefit.Īnother new interface worthy of note is HDMI 2b. With the GTX 1080, multiple GPUs can now be linked properly together using a new dual-link SLI mode, increasing the bandwidth between the GPUs. Previously, if you wanted to use more than two cards together, you had to effectively combine two independent two-way SLI interfaces.
New interfacesĪnother area that’s had an overhaul is Nvidia’s SLI interface, which combines the power of multiple GPUs. Memory gets an even bigger leap: the GTX 1080 sees Nvidia moving to GDDR5X memory via a 256-bit memory interface, which in this case is clocked at an effective 10,000MHz (effective) – a massive step up in bandwidth from the 7,010MHz memory of the GTX 980 Ti. Its core has a base clock of 1.61GHz, boosting to 1.73GHz – a big jump from the GTX 980 Ti’s 1GHz core clock. However, those are based on the old Maxwell core: thanks to improvements in the core design, Nvidia claims that the GTX 1080 will not only outpace the older card, it will outperform a pair of GTX 980 cards in SLI configuration.Īnother advantage the GTX 1080 has over its predecessor is clock speed. That might not sound too groundbreaking: the last-generation GeForce GTX 980 Ti has 2,816 stream processors.