The GTX 1080 Ti has been a long time coming; the original GTX 1080 launched way back in May 2016, followed in order by cheaper alternatives the 1070, 1060, 1050 Ti and 1050. What the range has been missing is a top-end showstopper. And you can’t really blame Nvidia for that; the GTX 1080 was so far ahead of any other graphics card launched in the previous 12 months, Nvidia was under no pressure to launch a bigger product. Why waste a ridiculously powerful product when there’s no competition?
With the arrival of AMD’s RX Vega GPU later this year, Nvidia is covering its bases with a graphics card that should go toe-to-toe with whatever AMD ends up offering at the top-end of the market.
The 1080 Ti looks set to be the first graphics card to truly master 4K gaming at maximum settings, something the GTX 1080 couldn’t quite manage under harsh benchmarking circumstances. The new card shouldn’t break a sweat under the same circumstances.
GTX 1080 TI UK PRICE
The 1080 Ti is going to launch next week for $699 or £699. That UK price tag is slighly higher than expected, which puts some clear air between the 1080 Ti and the regular 1080 and might make you think twice about shelling out the better part of £700.
Still, that's around £300 cheaper than the Titan X.
GTX 1080 TI SPECS AND TECHNOLOGY
What’s new? The 1080 Ti is based on the same GP102 chip as last year’s ultra-high-end Titan X GPU, with a slightly slimmed down specification to make its pricing slightly more reasonable. However, this isn’t just a Titan X Lite and, perversely, it's going to end up being faster.
| Card | 1080 Ti | Titan X (Pascal) | 1080 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transistors | 12bn | 12bn | 7.2bn |
| CUDA cores | 3584 | 3584 | 2560 |
| Boost clock | 1.6GHz | 1.53Ghz | 1.73GHz |
| Memory capacity | 11GB | 12GB | 8GB |
| Memory speed | 11Gbps | 10Gbps | 10Gbps |
| TDP | 250W | 250W | 180W |
The GP102 chip is built on Nvidia’s ultra-efficient “Pascal” architecture, which powers all the other 10-series GPUs released in 2016.
You get the full 12 billion transistors found on the regular card and the same number of CUDA cores, 3584. There’ll be 11GB of GDDR5X memory (versus 12Gb on the Titan X) running at a massive 11Gbps (11GHz). Nvidia says this is the fastest GDDR5X memory ever manufactured and has worked alongside chipmaker Micron to boost memory speeds well beyond what we’ve seen before from an unmodified, production-ready graphics card.
Even better, the chip’s boost clock speed is rated at 1.6GHz and can be overclocked to 2GHz and beyond. Again, this is slightly faster than the Titan X, which had a boost clock speed of 1.53GHz.
As is now customary, Nvidia will launch a “Founders Edition” card first for early adopters, using it as a way to make a design statement. Generally, Founders Edition cards end up being cheaper than high-end third-party cards, but also slightly slower once the market shakes out.
In terms of physical design, on the outside it’s more or less the same as the GTX 1080 and 1070. Internally, Nvidia says they’ve shaken things up a bit, with a quieter fan on the Founders Edition. There’s also a smoother power delivery system for much more efficient power output, making the chip run cooler and thereby faster.
You get three DisplayPort connectors alongside a HDMI port, but for the first time Nvidia has dropped the DVI connector. This isn’t hugely surprising given DVI does not have the bandwidth to deliver the sorts of high-resolution gameplay the 1080 Ti is designed for. With that being said, gamers with a cheaper or older secondary monitor that only has DVI connections might miss it.
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