Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is now the fastest graphics card available, and at $500 cheaper than the previous champ! Should you buy now, or wait for AMD's Vega?
Nobody was surprised when Nvidia introduced its GeForce GTX 1080 Ti at this year’s Game Developer Conference. What really got gamers buzzing was the card's $700 price tag.
Based on its specifications, GeForce GTX 1080 Ti should be every bit as fast as Titan X (Pascal), or even a bit quicker. So why shave off so much of the flagship’s premium? We don’t really have a great answer, except that Nvidia must be anticipating AMD’s Radeon RX Vega and laying the groundwork for a battle at the high-end.

Why now? Because GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is ready today, Nvidia tells us. And because Vega is not, we’d snarkily add.

Turning A Zero Into A Hero

There are currently two graphics cards based on Nvidia’s GP102 processor: Titan X and Quadro P6000. The former uses a version of the GPU with two of its Streaming Multiprocessors disabled, while the latter employs a pristine GP102, without any defects at all.
We’re talking about a 12 billion transistor chip, though. Surely yields aren’t so good that they all bin into one of those two categories, right? Enter GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.
The 1080 Ti employs a similar Streaming Multiprocessor configuration as Titan X—28 of its 30 SMs are enabled, yielding 3584 CUDA cores and 224 texture units. Nvidia pushes the processor’s base clock rate up to 1480 MHz and cites a typical GPU Boost frequency of 1582 MHz. In comparison, Titan X runs at 1417 MHz and has a Boost spec of 1531 MHz.

Where the new GeForce differs is its back-end. Both Titan X and Quadro P6000 utilize all 12 of GP102’s 32-bit memory controllers, ROP clusters, and slices of L2 cache. This leaves no room for the foundry to make a mistake. Rather than tossing the imperfect GPUs, then, Nvidia turns them into 1080 Tis by disabling one memory controller, one ROP partition, and 256KB of L2. The result looks a little wonky on a spec sheet, but it’s perfectly viable nonetheless. As such, we get a card with an aggregate 352-bit memory interface, 88 ROPs, and 2816KB of L2 cache, down from Titan X’s 384-bit path, 96 ROPs, and 3MB L2.
Left alone, that’d put GeForce GTX 1080 Ti at a slight disadvantage. But in the months between 1080’s launch and now, Micron introduced 11 Gb/s (and 12 Gb/s, according to its datasheet) GDDR5X memories. The higher data rate more than compensates for the narrower memory bus: on paper, GeForce GTX 1080 Ti offers a theoretical 484 GB/s to Titan X’s 480 GB/s.
Of course, eliminating one memory channel affects the card’s capacity. Stepping down from 12GB to 11GB isn’t particularly alarming when we’re testing against a 4GB Radeon R9 Fury X that works just fine at 4K, though. Losing capacity is also preferable to repeating the problem Nvidia had with GeForce GTX 970, where it removed an ROP/L2 partition, but kept the memory, causing slower access to the orphaned 512MB segment. In this case, all 11GB of GDDR5X communicates at full speed.


Conclusion

Prior to Jen-Hsun’s pricing announcement on-stage in San Francisco, the Tom’s Hardware team debated where GeForce GTX 1080 Ti might land. $800 sounded cheap. $900 would have even been reasonable, given the card’s theoretical similarities to Titan X (Pascal) at $1200. Nobody suggested that Nvidia might replace GTX 1080 altogether at $700.
Why not? For a couple of reasons.
A $700 GeForce GTX 1080 Ti makes a $1200 Titan X look pretty ridiculous. The Titan’s only advantage is an extra 1GB of GDDR5X, after all. So it’ll either need to go away or drop in price significantly. Because Nvidia only sells the card though its own site, though, controlling Titan X’s fate seems like a simple matter. There’s always the 3840-core GP100 processor, if there ever came a need for a beefier Titan card…


Then there’s the fact that 1080 Ti effectively replaces 1080 at the same price point. If you’re a gamer who didn’t upgrade when the 1080/1070 launched last year, this is great news. But if you bought a 1080 Founders Edition card one month before GDC, then you’re probably reading up on return policies. Shoot, even Oculus knew it’d get backlash after announcing its $600 Rift/Touch package. The company dropped $50 into our Store account, since we had registered our Touch controllers within the 30 days leading up to GDC. But Nvidia says there are no plans to do something similar.

Gamers who were previously on the fence about a new high-end graphics card are looking at an entirely new class of performance at a price point we simply weren’t expecting. In essence, it’s a Titan X at the 1080 Founders Edition’s price. Does Nvidia know something about AMD’s upcoming flagship that nobody else does and is pricing accordingly? Perhaps. Truth be told, secrets don’t last very long in this business. But the beginnings of GeForce GTX 1080 Ti likely started with Nvidia figuring out what it could harvest out of GP102s saddled by a bad ROP cluster or memory controller.
What results is a card capable of smooth performance at 3840x2160, in many games with the quality settings max’ed out. It tears through 1440p too, if you prefer gaming on a fast-refresh display, or want to give G-Sync a spin. We have VR titles in the lab that cause a GTX 1070 to trip up. In time, they’ll start overwhelming 1080s as well, necessitating something like the 1080 Ti to maintain a constant 90 Hz.
Of course, Nvidia is handling this launch differently than Titan X. Board partners will have their own custom designs, to start. The $700 MSRP applies equally to the third-party and Founders Edition models, we’re happy to report. And although some SKUs will undoubtedly command premium pricing, we expect Nvidia’s implementation to anchor the rest, preventing the rampant inflation that plagued Pascal last summer.
When a room full of experienced reviewers hears a price that makes them all look at each other, muttering “wow,” then you know the product’s going to do well. GeForce GTX 1080 Ti delivers frame rates we could have predicted at a price that caught us by surprise.
Equally relevant is the pressure that 1080 Ti puts on the old guard. GeForce GTX 1080 cards are already selling for $500 online, and the Founders Edition board dropped to $550 on Nvidia’s own site. GeForce GTX 1070s aren’t any cheaper yet, but that move could be waiting in the wings once Radeon RX Vega makes itself known.

Oh, right. Vega. We already know so much about what AMD’s next-generation flagship can do. And yet we’re still waiting for some indication of what it can do. It’s hard for us to imagine a scenario where Radeon RX Vega delivers notably better performance per dollar than what we just tested. But we invite AMD to prove us wrong. Really. AMD, please.

Verdict

Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition simultaneously ascends the throne as a new performance king and extends Titan X-class performance to gamers for $500 less. There is a lot to like if you want to enjoy your favorite games on a 4K monitor, with a fast-refresh QHD display, or in virtual reality. Although some of Nvidia’s board partners will offer 1080 Tis with bigger coolers and less noise, its Founders Edition card remains a favorite for its ability to exhaust waste heat. We’re eager to see how AMD’s Radeon RX Vega responds in Q2.

source: tomshardware.com