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Nvidia announces GTX 1070 and 1080 with potential for notebooks

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang proudly presents his new baby
Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang proudly presents his new baby
The GTX 1080 is coming later this month for $599 USD. The Pascal GPU will have a slightly higher TDP than the outgoing Maxwell GTX 980 with a claimed 70 percent increase in performance.

A few years after the announcement of the Pascal architecture comes the first consumer GeForce cards based on the new technology. The first models will, of course, be from the enthusiast end with the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080. Both will be one of the first GPUs to be manufactured on a 16 nm FinFET process for higher performance-per-Watt. The latest HDMI 2.0b and DisplayPort 1.4 standards will be supported.

Geforce GTX 1080

The new top-end model will make use of 8 GB of GDDR5X VRAM with 9 TeraFLOPS of raw performance. When compared to the GTX 980, Nvidia is claiming a 70 percent performance increase with just a 10 W higher power demand to 180 W. The GTX 1080 will have be roughly 20 percent faster than the Titan X. Shipments of the GTX 1080 are expected to begin this May 28th for $599 with a higher-end $699 USD version. This latter "Founders Edition" model will carry more overclocking potential as it includes an additional onboard fan. Core specifications are:

  • 7.3 billion transistors
  • 2560 cores
  • 9 TeraFLOPS
  • 8 GB GDDR5X (G5X) Micron RAM
  • 2114 MHz core clock (likely overclocked in the Nvidia press demo)
  • 5508 MHZ memory clock rate (likely overclocked in the Nvidia press demo, 5000 MHz will be more likely in consumer models)
  • 180 Watt TDP, fan cooling
  • HDMI 2.0b (4K @ 60 Hz, HDR Video)
  • DisplayPort 1.4 (4K @ 120 Hz)
  • Dual-Link DVI

GTX 1070 and potential for notebooks

Since the GTX 980 for notebooks can range from 100 W to 200 W, the slightly higher power demand of the new GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 will likely be adapted for notebooks in the future. Sources are telling us that Nvidia will be aiming for the same TDP target as the GTX 980 and that the Pascal GPUs should run cooler than the GTX 980 on average. It's unlikely that Nvidia will drop the "M" suffix for future mobile GeForce GPUs, at least on the enthusiast level.

While power demand will ultimately be quite similar to the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, Nvidia has unfortunately not explicitly stated the TDP for the GTX 1070. Unlike the GTX 1080, the 1070 will use 8 GB of GDDR5 VRAM and deliver "just" 6.5 TeraFLOPS. The 1070 will launch this coming June 10 for $379 USD, which is surprisingly and significantly cheaper than the 1080. A "Founders Edition" will also be made available for $449.

Simultaneous Multi-Projection

A new and noteworthy feature of Pascal-based GeForce cards will be "Simultaneous Multi-Projection", which allows the GPU to output one scene in up to 16 different ways simultaneously without the computational cost of rendering the scene 16 times. This will have clear advantages for multi-monitor setups and especially VR where higher image quality can be achieved when there are more viewports per eye. In comparison, the Maxwell architecture is limited to 2 simultaneous Multi-Projection scenes.

Nvidia also unveiled new software features and developer tools such as Nvidia Ansel and an improved Nvidia VRWorks.

See our in-depth review of the new GTX 1080 here.

+ Nvidia press release
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> Expert Reviews and News on Laptops, Smartphones and Tech Innovations > News > News Archive > Newsarchive 2016 05 > Nvidia announces GTX 1070 and 1080 with potential for notebooks
Alexander Fagot/ Allen Ngo, 2016-05- 7 (Update: 2016-05-17)