NVIDIA Announces GTX 1080 Ti, Purportedly 35% Faster Than GTX 1080 at $699

Tonight NVIDIA has announced the top dog of their GeForce GTX graphics cards, the GTX 1080 Ti. The new Ti model succeeds the GTX 1080 to become the flagship GPU of Nvidia’s consumer line.

Launched last year, Nvidia’s latest 10-series GPUs ushered forth a completely reworked GPU architecture called Pascal which brought features like Simultaneous Multi Projection that are particularly well suited to the demands of today’s VR rendering.

Announced in May of 2016, the flagship GTX 1080 would go down as the most powerful Geforce card ever released, with 8GB of GDDR5X running at 10Gbps. Now lowered to a $500 price tag (revealed at today’s event) if the GTX 1080 didn’t quite cut it for your ultra-high-end VR rig, you’re in luck.

Announced this evening during an NVIDIA event alongside GDC, the new GPUs speedy G5X memory has been overclocked to run at 11Gbps. Add to that 3,584 CUDA cores and 12 billion transistors, and you’ve got what Nvidia claims is roughly a 35% performance boost over the original GTX 1080, based on comparative benchmarks across a smattering of PC game benchmarks.

GTX 1080 Ti Specs

• 12B Transistors
• 1.6GHz Boost, 2GHz OC
• 28 SMs, 128 cores each
• 3,584 CUDA cores
• 28 Geometry units
• 224 Texture units
• 6 GPCs
• 88 ROP units
• 352 bit GDDR5X
• 11GB of GDDR5X

Tweaks to the card’s power supply have added several points of power efficiency, especially during high power draw. Improved cooler performance makes the card 5 degrees celsius cooler at the same noise level, or 2.5dB quieter at the same temperature, Nvidia says.

To conclude today’s event, it was announced that the GTX 1080 Ti is launching next week at the price tag of $699. Like the other 10-series cards, Nvidia will launch their own Founder’s Edition version of the GPU, except this time it will have the same MSRP as 1080 Ti cards made by chip partners of the company.

Disclosure: Along with other press, NVIDIA covered accommodation expenses for Road to VR to attend an event where information for this article was gathered.