March 28, 2024
The cooler shroud of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080

Nvidia has announced their latest graphics cards based on the Pascal architecture, the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. Both cards are built on TSMC’s 16nm FinFEt technology and bring a wide array of revolutionary performance and efficiency improvement over the Maxwell architecture. Nvidia claims the GTX 1080 provides significantly faster performance over the Titan X with a TDP of only 180 Watts.

 

Nvidia announces the GTX 1080 in full force

 

 

Nvidia is touting a “groundbreaking new design” with a new, sleek look for the 1080 cooler shroud, updated from the NVTTM design used in Kepler and Maxwell graphics cards. Nvidia promises that the new cards will be able to play 4K games with respectable frame rates and image quality compared to the Maxwell GPUs.

 

Nvidia's GTX 1080

 

 

 

The GTX 1080 is powered by the GP104 GPU, successor to the GM204 which was used in the GTX 980 graphics card, but thanks to the 16nm FinFET manufacturing process, Nvidia has been able to increase transistor density significantly while improving performance at minimal power consumption hits.

 

The Nvidia Pascal architecture advantages

 

The performance of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1080 is just off the charts. NVIDIA’s CEO, Jen-Hsun, mentioned at the announcement that the GeForce GTX 1080 is not only faster than one GeForce GTX 980 but it crushes two 980s in SLI, all thanks to the massive jump from the 28nm tech to 16nm.

 

Nvidia's GTX 1080, compared to the 980 SLI

 

Thanks to a mix of the new cooler and an insanely efficient process, the GTX 1080 can be overclocked to an incredible 2.1 GHz on air, while remaining under manageable temperatures, on air cooling.

The Nvidia GTX 1080, showing off its OC Potential

 

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, the performance metrics don’t stop at the 980. Compared to the GeForce GTX Titan X which is a 8 billion transistor behemoth with 3072 CUDA Cores, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 is a whole lot faster. This means we have a new champ from NVIDIA in the market that beats the GeForce GTX 980 Ti and the GeForce GTX Titan X at just 180W.

Nvidia showing off the relative performance of the 1080

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 features the GP104 GPU (GP104-400-A1) core which comprises of 2560 CUDA cores. NVIDIA’s FinFET architecture allows significant increase in clock frequency increase. The GeForce GTX 1080 was shown clocking in at 2.1 GHz clock speeds on air cooling.

The actual clock speeds are maintained at 1607 MHz base and 1733 MHz boost but the FinFET architecture allows for extreme overclocking as demoed at the event. The chip features 8 GB of GDDR5X memory featured across a 256-bit bus and clocked at 10 GB/s. This leads to a total bandwidth of 320 GB/s.
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080's specs

 

Nvidia also showed off a new SLI bridge, called the HB-SLI, which “doubles the available bandwidth compared to the Maxwell SLI bridges” allowing for silky-smooth gaming sessions. The new bridge will be available for the GTX 1080 on release on May 27.

Nvidia's new SLI bridge, exclusively for the GTX 1080

 

The full specs of the GTX 1080 are given below:

GPU Engine Specs:  
NVIDIA CUDA® Cores: 2560
Base Clock (MHz):  1607
Boost Clock (MHz): 1733
Memory Specs:
Memory Speed:  10 Gbps
Standard Memory Config: 8 GB GDDR5X
Memory Interface Width: 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec): 320
Technology Support:
Multi-Projection
SLI HB Bridge Supported NVIDIA SLI®
NVIDIA GPU Boost
12 API with feature level 12_1Microsoft DirectX
Vulkan API
OpenGL 4.5
PCIe 3.0Bus Support
Windows 7-10, Linux, FreeBSDx86OS Certification

Display Support:
Maximum Digital Resolution: 7680×4320@60Hz

Output: DP 1.4, HDMI 2.0b, DL-DVI Standard Display Connectors
HDCP 2.2 complisnt
Graphics Card Dimensions:
Height: 4.376″
Length:  10.5″
Slot Width: 2-Slot
Thermal and Power Specs:
Maximum GPU Tempurature (in C): 94
Graphics Card Power (W): 180 W
Recommended System Power (W): 500 W
8-Pin Supplementary Power Connectors
In addition to that, NVIDIA has also announced their most competitive graphics card to date, the GeForce GTX 1070. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 offers performance faster than the GeForce GTX Titan X at a price of just $379 US. The graphics card combines all the features of NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture to deliver the best gaming and VR experiences to users making it the most efficient and the most insane graphics card built for gamers, and will be available for purchase on June 10.
 The difference between the GTX 1080 and the 1070 is that the 1070 uses the GDDR5 memory and the  1080 uses the GDDR5X memory, but it is expected to support the exact same features as the GTX 1080, and is expected to have a TDP in the neighborhood of 150W.
Nvidia's GTX 1070, the younger brother of 1080