With several billions of dollars invested into research and development on Pascal, the graphics company’s CEO now says these cards to have “almost irresponsible amounts of performance.”

Power efficiency was a top priority with 10 series GPUs 

The company has made extensive improvements to the power design and circuitry of its 10-series Pascal lineup. It now claims that the Geforce GTX 1080 reaches 120mV peak-to-peak efficiency while the previous GTX 980 does 209mV peak-to-peak. The efficiency improvement now allows Nvidia to offer a 180W TDP over a single 8-pin PCI-E power connector.



“The switching power supply design is incredibly hard to do,” Jen-Hsun said during the keynote. “This is probably one of the most complicated, most artful, most advanced switching power supplies that humanity does today.”

“With the billions of transistors that are switching, our goal is to deliver DC power. Whether it’s Tomb Raider running or Excel running, or Division, a big explosion, or Minesweeper – it doesn’t matter. It has to deliver that clean power. And when we don’t deliver clean power, we lose performance and energy efficiency. So clean power is incredibly important.”

“The envelope was Maxwell – GTX 980 – the best GPU we’ve ever built,” Jen-Hsun continued. “With GTX 1080, the variance has reduced dramatically. With a 1V input, 100mV is all we see. We want to deliver that level of power and current across our entire operating range of GPUs.”

 “The 1080 is insane. It’s almost irresponsible amounts of performance. It’s faster than a Titan X, not by a little bit, but by a whole lot, and with much less power.”

In a recent benchmark run, the Geforce GTX 1080 was shown ending up with a 27,683 graphics score in the Performance preset of Futuremark’s 3DMark 11 test when paired with an Intel Core i7 5820K processor. It also received a graphics score of 10,102 in Futuremark’s FireStrike Extreme test when paired with an Intel Core i7 3770 processor.

Additionally, the maximum digital output resolution has jumped from 5K (5120x3200p) on Maxwell to 8K (7680x4320p) with Pascal. Based on today’s announcement, it appears the company may be planning to reserve High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for its upcoming Titan series flagships based on its GP100 GPU core. These units are expected to launch with up to 16GB memory configurations (32GB for Quadro cards) sometime in Q4 2016 or early Q1 of next year.

Geforce GTX 1080 – twice the performance of Geforce GTX Titan X

Just as we mentioned back in March, Nvidia’s Geforce GTX 1080 features GDDR5X memory, and now we can confirm it will be made by Micron. Memory speed has been upgraded from 7GHz on the GTX 980 to 10GHz on the GTX 1080 with an effective bandwidth of 320GB/s.

Nvidia’s Geforce GTX 1080 uses a GP104 Pascal GPU and features 2560 cores, a 1.60GHz base clock (1.73GHz boost clock) and 8GB of GDDR5X. With 9 teraflops of single-precision floating point performance, Nvidia says it will surpass the performance of two Geforce GTX 980s in SLI. The company also claims that a single Geforce GTX 1080 is faster than its current Maxwell flagship, the Geforce GTX Titan X (March 2015) based on GM200 (7 teraflops single-precision), and is just half the price.

According to the company's own marketing slides, the card will average around 65 percent faster than a single Geforce GTX 980 and 20 to 25 percent faster than a Titan X or GTX 980 Ti. Already, the 1.60GHz base clock is a 43 percent frequency increase over a GTX 980. The card will have five display outputs – three DisplayPort 1.2 ports (1.4 “ready” with 4K at 120Hz), one HDMI 2.0b port (4K at 60Hz) and one DL-DVI port.

Another impressive note about today's announcement was that Nvidia's demonstration GPU during the event was overclocked from 1733MHz to a 2114MHz core speed – a modest 23 percent increase over the official boost clock. The company has confirmed that its Geforce Pascal lineup will feature vapor chamber coolers, something the 900 series did not, and this should go a long way in shaping overclocking performance results for stock cooler users.

For reference, the Geforce GTX Titan X features 3072 cores, 192 texture units, a 1GHz base clock, 12GB of GDDR5 and a 250W TDP. The current 900-series flagship, the Geforce GTX 980 Ti, features 2816 cores, 176 texture units, a 1GHz base clock, 6GB of GDDR5 and a 250W TDP.

Geforce GTX 1070 – faster than a Geforce GTX Titan Black

The Geforce GTX 1070 uses a GP104-200 Pascal GPU and features 2048 cores, 8GB of standard GDDR5 memory and features 6.5 teraflops of single-precision floating point performance. This number effectively places the Geforce GTX 1070 right between the Geforce GTX Titan X (7 teraflops) and the Geforce GTX Titan Black (5.1 teraflops). The card will have five display outputs – three DisplayPort 1.2 ports (1.4 “ready” with 4K at 120Hz), one HDMI 2.0b port (4K at 60Hz) and one DL-DVI port.

For reference of single-precision floating point numbers, the Radeon Fury X (June 2015) achieves 8.6 teraflops, the Geforce GTX Titan Z (March 2014) gets 8.1 teraflops, the Geforce GTX Titan X (March 2015) gets 7 teraflops, the Geforce GTX 980 Ti (June 2015) gets 5.6 teraflops, and the Geforce GTX Titan Black (February 2014) gets 5.1 teraflops.

Nvidia launches new “High-Bandwidth SLI” bridges

During the event, Nvidia also launched a new Scalable Link Interface (SLI) bridge for Pascal-based GPUs called “high-bandwidth SLI,” or HB SLI. The official Geforce site (towards the bottom) claims this bridge doubles the amount of available transfer bandwidth compared to running Maxwell-based GPUs in SLI.

Pricing and availability

As mentioned previously, Nvidia is glad to claim that Geforce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 are the world’s first 16-nanometer FinFET-based GPUs. Power and performance claims aside, however, our favorite part of this launch announcement was that split second in the live stream video when some young kid in the audience gleefully yelled, “What? I can [actually] afford that!” in response to Jen-Hsun’s Geforce GTX 1080 unveiling.

The company will launch a standard Geforce GTX 1080 for $599 along with an alternative Geforce GTX 1080 Founders Edition for $699 on Friday, May 27th.

Two weeks later on Friday, June 10th, the company will launch a standard Geforce GTX 1070 for $379 along with an alternative Geforce GTX 1070 Founders Edition for $449.

While Nvidia launched the Geforce GTX 980 in September 2014 for $50 less than the GTX 1080 and the GTX 970 for $50 less than the GTX 1070, the difference this time around is that it claims both cards are faster than the company’s current flagships – the Geforce GTX Titan X ($1000) and GTX 980 Ti ($649).