NVIDIA announces GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, Pascal based graphics cards

NVIDIA has taken the wraps off its next generation flagship graphics cards, the GTX 1080 and the cheaper GTX 1070.

The main attraction here is that both the cards are based on NVIDIA's new Pascal architecture and manufactured using 16nm FinFET process, which makes it more efficient, 3x compared to the previous Maxwell architecture, and also smaller, while packing in 7.2 billion transistors.

The GTX 1080 comes with 2560 CUDA cores, up from 2048 on the 980. It is clocked at 1607MHz, with a boost clock of 1733MHz. The card is also overclockable with the new GPU Boost 3.0.

One of the major improvements is to the memory, with the addition of 8GB GDDR5X memory and 256-bit memory bus. It's not quite HBM2, it still features improved bandwidth over GDDR5, with 10Gbps of memory clock and 320GB/s memory bandwidth. The TDP has increased by 15W over the 980 to 180W on the 1080, but it should be worth it, as the 1080 is 20-25% times faster than the previous flagship, Titan X, and a significant 65% faster than the 980.

One of the changes is also to the design. It looks similar to the design that was introduced back in 2013 with the original GTX Titan, but is now more angular everywhere. Underneath, the 1080 runs a new vapor chamber cooler for more efficient cooling. On the connectivity side, the card includes 3 DisplayPort 1.2 ports (support for 1.3/1.4 coming later), 1 HDMI, and 1 DL-DVI-D port. The new cards also support the updated GTS SLI HB bridge, which doubles the transfer bandwidth and comes in a brand new design with three different sizes. Power supply is through a single eight pin connector.

The 1070 is a bit less impressive, with fewer but unspecified CUDA cores and lower, again unspecified clock speed. It also lacks the faster GDDR5X memory, and instead has 8GB GDDR5 memory. NVIDIA claims the 1070 is capable of 6.5 teraflops, whereas the 1080 can do 9 teraflops. It does use the same 16nm FinFET process with 7.2 billion transistor count.

The GTX 1080 will be available in Founders Edition for $699 on May 27 from various OEMs, including NVIDIA. This will be the one with reference design. The custom board designs from OEMs will start at $599.

The GTX 1070 Founders Edition will be available from June 10 for $499, and custom boards from $379.

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