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NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1080 is 10.5inches of pure madness

NVIDIA Chief Executive Officer, Jen-Hsun Huang revealed Team Green’s latest GPU, the GeForce GTX 1080 to the world via a live stream from Austin, Texas.

Huang boasted that the new GPUs had been developed at a cost of billions, and as a result offered an “irresponsible level of performance”.

Now, you would be forgiven for thinking that was just another phrase to get the hype train rolling before these cards are released in June. After seeing the numbers, though, we’re inclined to agree with Huang.

The rumour mill rightly guessed that the new GTX 1080 would be using a 16nm FinFET manufacturing process. In simple English, this means that the card will only draw 180W and, according to NVIDIA, will be as powerful as two GeForce GTX 980 Ti cards configured in SLI and the NVIDIA Titan X.

The GTX 1080 has 2560 CUDA cores and the Base Clock speed comes in at a frankly astounding 1607MHz, with boost pushing that to 1733MHz.

To explain why this has us dropping our jaws, the Titan X (which is widely regarded as the pinnacle of gaming GPUs) registered a base clock speed of 1000MHz and a boost of 1075MHz, and had 500 more CUDA cores.

The 1080 continues to wipe the floor with a memory pipe of 10Gbps and a memory bandwidth of 320GB/s. Speaking of which, this GPU doesn’t use high bandwidth memory (HBM) instead, NVIDIA has 8GBs of GDDR5X.

The card also supports NVIDIA’s own technologies like G-SYNC, GameStream and SLI. There are also two new technologies the GPU will support. Multi-Projection will reportedly improve how your game looks when using multiple monitors.

Team Green realised that the PC gamers who use three monitors don’t use them in a straight line and this distorts the image a bit.

This new technology is meant to correct that problem and while it sounds very cool, its one of those things you really need to see to believe, so take a look below.

There’s also a new screen capture software NVIDIA is showing off called Ansel. The software will allow gamers to literally dive into the game and take pictures at resolutions 32 times higher than some monitors support. According to PC World, a demo was shown at resolutions tipping 61 000 pixels in width.

Ansel will also reportedly support 360 degree images so you can take screenshots using your VR headset and explore them later in the full 360 degrees. The following games currently support Ansel including The Witcher 3, Tom Clancy’s The Division and the yet to be released Lawbreakers.

VRWorks Audio is the final of the new technologies NVIDIA revealed along with the GPU. The tech is reportedly meant to tweak the audio in VR games and deliver positional audio in VR games. The intended result is that VR games become even more immersive.

Team Green will be releasing the NVIDIA Funhouse soon which is a VR app designed to showcase the new software.

So the last remaining question then is, what its going to cost you? The Titan X was famously launched at $1 000 putting it squarely out of reach for everybody but hardcore enthusiasts.

Rather than take the same approach, NVIDIA has priced the GTX 1080 at $599 which is a bit lighter on the wallet. Granted, that’s like saying its a bit windy out during a hurricane but we could see this card retailing for about the same price as a GTX 980 Ti (R12 000 to R14 000) here in South Africa.

The next cards we hear about will more than likely be from AMD as it readies its Polaris based GPUs for release sometime this year.

Team Red has said that it will be using its next generation of GPUs to re-enter the enthusiast market, but with the release of the GTX 1080 that seems like a hard ask, especially when you consider that NVIDIA just pushed its own GPU range, from the Titan X down, into obsolescence.

[Source – NVIDIA][Image – NVIDIA]

 

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