Nvidia announces the first consumer products based on Pascal architecture-- the GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070, both claiming to beat the flagship GTX Titan X in performance, efficiency and even pricing.
The successor to Maxwell, Pascal was first seen in a product designed for supercomputers, the Tesla P100. It promises "massive leaps in performance, memory bandwidth and power efficiency" through construction using a 16nm FinFET process packing 7.2 billion transistors on the GPU. The cards also offer 8GB of GDDR5X RAM and clock speeds reaching over 1700MHz.
The result, according to Nvidia, allows the GTX 1080 to deliver x2 the performance and x3 the efficiency of the GTX Titan X. Further showing off the capabilities of the GTX 1080 was a launch demonstration running Paragon (the latest shooter from Epic Games) at 60fps with GPU clock speeds of 2.1GHz and the memory clock running at 5508MHz with a temperature of 67 degrees Celsius, all while the card was neither air- nor water-cooled.
On the other hand the GTX 1070 offers performance levels comparable to the Titan X, only at a lower price price.
"The PC is the world's favorite gaming platform, and our new Pascal GPU architecture will take it to new heights," Nvidia says. "Our first Pascal gaming GPU, the GeForce GTX 1080, enables incredible realism in gaming and deeply immersive VR experiences, with dramatically improved performance and efficiency. It's the most powerful gaming GPU ever built, and some of our finest work."
The GTX 1080 hits the market by end May 2016, with the GTX 1070 to follow from June. Both cards will also be available as "Founders Editions" featuring a redesigned aluminium shroud and cooling system.
