NVIDIA Unveils GeForce GTX 1080, GTX 1070, Faster Than Titan X For a Lot Less (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes (edited and condensed): NVIDIA has unveiled its next-generation Pascal-based GeForce graphics cards -- known as the GeForce GTX 1080 and GeForce GTX 1070. NVIDIA's Pascal architecture is based on 16nm FinFET technology, similar to that of NVIDIA's high-end data center Tesla P100 processing engine though the GeForce cards are targeted at the consumer gaming market. NVIDIA's GP104 GPU at the heart of the new GeForce cards is comprised of some 8 billion transistors and features a 256-bit memory interface with 8GB of Micron GDDR5X graphics memory on the GeForce GTX 1080. The GTX 1070, however, employs standard GDDR5. The core clock speed of the GeForce GTX 1080 hit 2.1GHz at one point during the demonstration, though GTX 1070 clocks were not disclosed. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang claimed the new GeForce GTX 1080 is faster than a pair of GeForce GTX 980 cards in SLI and faster than the company's very expensive Titan X graphics card but at half the price. The new GeForce GTX 1080 will be offered in two versions, a standard card with an MSRP of $599 or a highly-overclockable Founders Edition for $699. The standard GTX 1070 will arrive at $379, while a Founders Edition will be priced at $449. Availability for the GTX 1080 is slated for May 27th and the GTX 1070 for June 10. Anand Tech has more information.

Comments

Re:first?

[Anonymous Coward]

They Don't Think It Be Like It Is But It Do

AMD just crapped themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming the tests aren't complete lies, this is a huge jump.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD is in trouble.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[sexconker]

Assuming their "A NEW KING" graph isn't a lie, it's $600-$700 for 1.7x the performance of a single 980. This also jives with their claim about it being faster than 2 980s in SLI.

The graph is missing the 980 Ti though, which is what people paying $600-$700 for a GPU will be comparing it to.
I can understand not including the 980 Ti since we're talking about the 1080 and not a 1080 Ti. But they went ahead and included the Titan X. That's some major bullshit - the Titan X is an expensive piece of shit compared to the 980 Ti. A reference 980 Ti is nearly identical in performance to a Titan X at $400-$500 cheaper. A non-reference 980 Ti will easily beat a Titan X and still save you $200-$300. (The Titan X is only available with the reference cooler.) The non-reference 980 Ti is also at the same $600-$700 price of the GTX 1080 (MSRP).

My guess based on their chart (using the Titan X as a baseline) is that the 1080 is about 30% faster than a reference 980 Ti and 15-20% faster than any of the dozens of non-reference designs out there now priced around $600-$700. (There are dozens more non-reference 980 Ti models priced higher and higher than that, if you've got money to burn.)

Anyone on a current generation card really should wait for the presumed 1080 Ti and AMD's Vega.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[UnknownSoldier]

> That's some major bullshit - the Titan X is an expensive piece of shit compared to the 980 Ti.

Whoa, hold on. Context is extremely important.

For gaming yup, that's some serious shenanigans(*) ! BUT for rendering the Titan X is faster then the 980 Ti.

(*) Obviously, many people don't feel the Price/Performance of the Titan X vs 980 Ti is worth it, myself included. Words along Over-priced, Greedy bastards come to mind, but if performance is king and money is no object then for rendering + scientific computing, the Titan X was the previous crown holder.

It all depends on context.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[sexconker]

And the context is the GTX 1080 - a gaming GPU.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[kuzb]

AMD has been in trouble for a decade now. On one side they've been getting their ass consistently handed to them by intel. On the other, there's nvidia.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

There are very very few situations where running 2 cards in SLI gives twice the performance of a single card. 1.7x would be at the top end of what you could expect.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[aliquis]

The GTX 980Ti is 7/8 the GPU of what the Titan X is with half the VRAM.

GTX 980 in SLI beats the GTX 980Ti.
Neither the GTX 980Ti or the Titan X is 70% faster than the GTX 980.

The rumors / claims I've heard from AMD side is that Polaris 10 almost reach Fury X and 980Ti performance but at a lower price, so that would mean more in line with the GTX 1070 too me and not on level with GTX 1080. Also it's not intended to replace the Fury cards and there they just released the dual GPU one which DOES beat the 980Ti (but the question is how does it compare to a GTX 1080 and how well will it sell at $1500..?)

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[Espectr0]

Maybe so, but for regular people that just want a laptop to browse cat videos on the internet while running a few windows apps, you can't beat something with an AMD CPU for the price.

Also, every console uses AMD.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

More to the point the Power TDP is closer to that of a GTX 760, so if you were waiting for an excuse to upgrade without a significant increase in power consumption, now is a good time. The 1070 likely will use less power than the GTX 760.

Hopefully nVidia doesn't release any substandard parts that can't do VR just to basically stick it to AMD and Intel with "nVidia actually supports VR"

No Intel part does, and AMD's most expensive parts are the only ones that can do VR.

But I still think VR is a dead on revival tech. This isn't the first time VR came out and it won't be the last time. At best we will see "3D" films and bluerays rereleased first, and following that maybe some VR-specific films (eg porn) and a few games, but It largely isn't going to take off because people will get sick from poorly designed games and shitty laptops/cheap desktops being used to power the VR equipment.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone wait for the TI? The 980 TI was released 9 months after the 980. Volta is not supposed to be released until 2018. Probably at the same time of year as the 1080 was. AMD is focusing on the mainstream segment and so I doubt that Polaris will be able to compete with the 1080. I doubt that the 1080 TI will be released in time for the Holidays... That would shortchange their revenue. I'd expect the 1080 TI to fill in the gap sometime same timeframe in 2017 so that people will have something to purchase before Volta. Why all this? Because: Money

Re: AMD just crapped themselves

[Redbehrend]

Not really anyone can make a benchmark system, amd is doing great right now. Nvidia is going to say the "new" features require it and we'll have last year all over again.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[Carewolf]

My guess based on their chart (using the Titan X as a baseline) is that the 1080 is about 30% faster than a reference 980 Ti and 15-20% faster than any of the dozens of non-reference designs out there now priced around $600-$700. (There are dozens more non-reference 980 Ti models priced higher and higher than that, if you've got money to burn.)

Anyone on a current generation card really should wait for the presumed 1080 Ti and AMD's Vega.

Yep. Except if you need VR or other multi-viewport rendering which seems to be the real trick in this card. Otherwise it is "just" a 20% increment on 980ti one year later.

Re: AMD just crapped themselves

[Kjella]

Every console uses AMD but if you look at their semi-custom revenue/profits margins are very slim. It's good for keeping production volume up as the smaller player but it's not good business. Whether that's because of market realities or because AMD lowballed it is hard to say, but I guess they expected a bigger payoff in the desktop market.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[zenlessyank]

AMD gets paid every time Intel sells an x64 chip. Tired of hearing this crap. AMD isn't going anywhere including broke. Go download a 64 bit iso for Linux. I don't care what distro it is. If it is 64 bit then it is labeled AMD64. Wonder why that is. Maybe you should Google that and learn something.

Re: AMD just crapped themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

This. Sensible and critically thinking people still exist, thank (non-existent) god (opinionated lowercasing).

Re: AMD just crapped themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

How much do you suppose NVidia spent on that dog and pony show to introduce these new GPUs? How many events like this do they do in a year? The money spent starts adding up pretty quickly. With embedded parts such as those used in current gen consoles all of the engineering work is paid by NRE and there is no marketing required by AMD so while the profit per chip might be lower the overhead to court potential customers is non-existent.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

The rumors / claims I've heard from AMD side is that Polaris 10

Polaris is an architecture not an individual part. Based on what has been announced the first Polaris parts will be mainstream with a follow-on high-end part coming later. The real question to me is whether NVidia is sandbagging GTX 1080 performance enough that they can do a GTX 1080ti part when the AMD high-end part comes out. Personally, I'd be absolutely livid if I bought a GTX 1080 now only to have a GTX 1080ti stomp it in benchmarks in the near future.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[thegarbz]

Maybe so, but for regular people that just want a laptop to browse cat videos on the internet while running a few windows apps, you can't beat something with an AMD CPU for the price.

Sure you can. Last AMD product I touched was a laptop with an AMD APU in it. Drivers on the HP website failed to detect the hardware correctly. AMD's own driver download utility correctly identified the chipset and yet said it won't supply drivers for it and I need to go to the vendor. After several hours of screwing around I finally forced the AMD driver to install which fixed most of the problems, but then at that point I was so incredibly pissed of with the entire experience that when I found another admittedly quite minor bug I lost my shit and returned the laptop and swapped it for something with an Intel HD graphics chipset, you know something so incredibly difficult that Windows Update just provides a current driver auto magically.

Not the first bad experience I had with AMD either. I also had a reference graphics card which I had to RMA after 1 month and was told it would be a 4 week turnaround, so I bought a GTX 550 and when the RMA'd card arrived back it went straight on the second hand market.

The last AMD product I was happy with was my Athlon 800. AMD has a lot of convincing to do before I'll consider it even for a cat video machine.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[spire3661]

"AMD gets paid every time Intel sells an x64 chip"

The Intel/AMD cross licensing agreement, in place since the SEVENTIES says 'lol'. Further, when it comes to R&D and patents, AMD is a cruel joke in comparison. AMD and Intel are NOT peers, they are not equals, they are not partners. Intel is a Titan of monstrous proportions, AMD is a Demi-God at best. People get this idea in their head that AMD is an equal competitor to Intel, they arent, not even close.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[PIBM]

Except that the 1080 is supposed to have a full double precision pipeline this time around, I can`t wait to see if that`s true!

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[PIBM]

Time is of the essence; if you want it now, if you have a very old setup, then it make sense to update. If not, it`s always worth it to keep pushing it further, until your current setup no longer does the job. If it didn`t do the job anymore, then buying what is available make sense, even if something better will come afterward. There`s always something better coming later anyway!

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are some numbers

May 6, 2016 Market caps:

AMD 3 Billion
Intel 142 Billion

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD is crap.

Re: AMD just crapped themselves

[default luser]

They pay for a night at a hotel and domestic airfare for maybe 100-200 people. Let's say an average airfare of $300, and the room costs $300, that puts your total schmoozing cost at 60-120k, plus the smaller cost of renting a big room for the presentation.

For that small cost, you get guaranteed coverage that will fire up social media, and even reach less interested sites like Slashdot, and it all happens SIMULTANEOUSLY from all those who attended, because they want to be first to report back from the exclusive event.

So Nvidia paper-launches a product with no actual reviews, and nobody can stop talking about it! That's a shitload more effective than a boring old press release., which may get buried.

Re: AMD just crapped themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

(Pedantic point)gods not god. That way you're ALSO pointing out that there are plenty of varieties of deities to choose from, every one as valid as any other.

Re: AMD just crapped themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you flr the correction. Will include in next reference related to gods.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[aliquis]

Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 is specific GPUs and the only ones I've seen any rumors for.

They aren't supposed to replace the Fury stuff, I would guess eventually the Fury stuff too would be replaced (with a HBM2 graphics card?) and eventually Vega till be released but for now it's Polaris and Polaris 10 is the best one of those and it's main-stream as you say and that's how it is.

Of course the GTX 1080Ti will beat the GTX 1080 if one is ever released it's how it is and most people would expect that and you're free to buy a shittier card such as the Polaris 10 one - you're welcome.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[kuzb]

Every console uses AMD not because it's the performant choice, but because it keeps costs down and console margins are narrow. Pound for pound there is no comparison between AMD and Intel. Intel wipes the floor with them.

At the end of the day if performance matters you don't buy AMD.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[slashkitty]

"Titan X is faster then the 980 Ti." for rendering, just barely. Hardly worth the price.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[Espectr0]

You just described my experience with a toshiba laptop with built in INTEL hd video 5 years ago. The "toshiba" driver had so many bugs and slowdows, i decided to try to get the stock intel driver from intel.com. It didn't install automatically from the auto detect tool intel has, but i downloaded it manually and it fixed most of my problems.

Re: AMD just crapped themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol to the guy " go dL a Linux ISO, AMD64' ....oh, that's a mainstream argument. Truly, point proven. Long live AMD ;)

Re: AMD just crapped themselves

[Type44Q]

I'm not defending AMD in the least but an FYI for those wanting to download the latest AMD and nVidia drivers for their OEM laptops: laptopvideo2go.com.

Re: AMD just crapped themselves

[Type44Q]

...jives

While it may in fact do just that (example: "honkey-ass cracker-motherfucker") the word you're looking for is actually jibe.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[edxwelch]

AMD is taking a different tactic. They will release 2 mid ranged Polaris cards at the same time that the GTX1080 is released. Mid range cards are where the bulk of the profits are.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

No, if performance matters, you switch to GPU compute and go with AMD or NVidia. Intel's best & most expensive devices aren't even vaguely competitive when it comes to GPU compute.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[sexconker]

For games the Titan X is (slightly) faster than a reference 980 Ti.
There aren't many reference 980 Tis out there. Most are in the $600-$700 range and are factory overclocked with non-reference coolers on them.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[sexconker]

Ask all the people who bought a 980 (or worse, Titan X) how it felt when the 980 Ti dropped.

Re: AMD just crapped themselves

[Agripa]

It's good for keeping production volume up as the smaller player but it's not good business.

Without their own fabs, production volume is something AMD can no longer take advantage of.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[Agripa]

I suspect what is going to happen is that the PC market will become more like the market existed before PCs. We had "development systems" running operating systems like CP/M which some people were using as PCs. The problem for AMD is that there is not enough demand in such a market to support both them and Intel. Intel talks about moving more into the server business but I do not think that can save AMD when the cost of Intel's CPU development covers their PC processors also.

And of course all it takes is for MIcrosoft to screw up their PC operating system which they are in the process of doing. With the exception of OSx, the alternatives run just as well on ARM.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, just look at all those Intel and Nvidia processors in the Wii U, Xbox One, and PS4. Oh wait.

You are nothing but the typical blind fanboy wasting money on an extra 3 FPS.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[Grim Beefer]

You're comparing apples to oranges. The Titan X was pushed more towards people that want a card for Software use, such as 3d rendering, not just for gaming. In desktop software applications, that aren't gaming, the Titan X has a clear performance gain.
 
I mean, Nvidia aren't - that - stupid, to release an inferior product for hundreds of more dollars, lol.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[thegarbz]

Ha. You were able to download it? I had to get the driver from a 3rd party website. This wasn't a case of autodetect not working, it was a case of yeah it may say AMD on it, but no you get your thing from somewhere else.

Also with the Intel HD graphics chip I concur. The Surface Pro3 drivers from MS for the longest time only produced a 6-bit colour output, a problem fixed by going to Intel's site and downloading their driver (no autodetect works, but finding the correct driver is trivial). .... Oh and then disabling windows fucking update because MS seemed to think they had a need to roll out a new broken driver once a month.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[sexconker]

The Titan X was still marketed heavily toward gamers. Nvidia aren't stupid. They sold buttloads of them. Then they trotted out the 980 Ti and people who bought the Titan X were pissed. Many of them ended up buying the 980 Ti however (or two to SLI). Nvidia knows their customers, and many of their customers are suckers.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[armanox]

Depends on the task, not everything benefits from GPGPU.

Re:AMD just crapped themselves

[Espectr0]

read my comment again, it was all over the intel hd driver that came with the toshiba laptop. When i had a radeon i never had issues with drivers, however i am aware than in the 2000's ati had a bad rep with drivers. today i am using a gtx 970 because it is the best card for the money

Waiting for big pascal

[Kjella]

Looks nice, but within a year I expect a cosumerish big pascal with hbm2 and closer to 300w as the ultimate single card. Not ready to replace my SLI setup for this one, but multi-gpu support is getting more and more niche. One monster card for 4k gaming would be great.

Re:Waiting for big pascal

[Gr8Apes]

I'd just like a low power quiet 4K HDR card for regular work at a $200 price point. :)

Re:Waiting for big pascal

[Shinobi]

Something I'm hoping for is smoother offloading of physics between multiple GPU's/cards, such that using 1 GPU for graphics, and the other card, not connected to a display, can be used for physics with less clunkiness than what is currently in use. Would be nice for various simulators for example.

Re:Waiting for big pascal

[CrashNBrn]

With Intel scaling back from Moores law, I think you are going to see Nvidia et al also scaling back from Moores law very very soon.

Re:Waiting for big pascal

[Fragnet]

It's less niche now we have DirectX 12 and Vulkan, which allows the developer to pipe command streams into each separately, rather than the driver having to guess how to divvy up the work.

Re:Waiting for big pascal

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

In a year in a year in a year.

something better is always going to come out. You can get a huge improvement over your current kit, or you can wring your hands and worry.

Re:Waiting for big pascal

[mrchaotica]

If you just want 4k for desktop pixels (as opposed to high-end gaming) then even an AMD R7 260x will do that. Mine even gets me acceptable framerates at 4k in most of the games I play, which tend to be older (e.g. Skyrim, TF2, Kerbal Space Program, Star Trek Online, etc.).

Re:Waiting for big pascal

[Gr8Apes]

you'll note that "cool" and "quiet" were 2 requirements at 4K HDR. I doubt the 260x will meet either of those requirements running near 80C under full load. 4K isn't exactly going to be a low load situation. I'd even prefer a fanless GPU if possible.

Re:Waiting for big pascal

[Blaskowicz]

80C is about the regular target for temperature with most any card. If it's not gazzling too much gas the fan might be slow running.
Every gen or half gen the power and fan control circuitry get more agressive/precise/low latency so you get something that tries to be high temperature, low heat and low noise.
  R7 360 is a bit slower and less power hungry though for HDR maybe you need the follow up generation, only for the DP 1.3 interface plus hdmi 2.0 for TVs.

Hum, pushing 4K Solitaire and Minesweeper? That should put a very low load.
Offer of low end GPU is fairly lacking yes.

Re:Waiting for big pascal

[locopuyo]

You can already configure PhysX to use a separate card in the NVIDIA control panel.

Re:Waiting for big pascal

[Shinobi]

Yeah, but it's still clunky, and doesn't always synch with the graphics properly

Re: Waiting for big pascal

[Type44Q]

gazzling

That's what, a baby goose??

Re:Waiting for big pascal

[armanox]

Considering that 4K monitors still aren't common, you've still got at least another year to go.

Re:Waiting for big pascal

[Gr8Apes]

Considering that 4K monitors still aren't common, you've still got at least another year to go.

There's plenty of 4K "monitors" available, but 4K HDR quality monitors are just starting to show up as of last month. Sony has one but they don't make their own panels anyways so I'll get better quality from someone that doesn't actively hate their customers.

The actual question

[Opportunist]

Will the drivers finally be stable?

Re:The actual question

[epyT-R]

more stable than amd's, yes.

Re: The actual question

[Redbehrend]

What's wrong with AMDs drivers right now? Are you on xp? Lol

Re:The actual question

[Opportunist]

More stable than... fuck, why can I only settle for crappy or less crappy? Don't the capitalism preachers constantly tell me just how much capitalism ensures that only that gets produced what the customer wants, and how happy we should be that we're not in commie hell where we could only buy what The Party thinks is good enough for us?

What's the difference between The Party and The Corporation deciding what the fuck I can buy?

Re: The actual question

[Anonymous Coward]

The advertising platform that gets sideloaded with the drivers is one thing wrong. I can say that on Win7 the AMD drivers are the cause of occasional crashes but don't have a NV to compare against.

Re:The actual question

[Anonymous Coward]

They *could* devote the time to developing drivers that crash less often, but they'd pass the cost of that developer time onto the consumer. Apparently they've decided that beyond a certain (frustratingly low) point, increases in stability do not add enough value to entice consumers spend more.

Consider a different industry: commercial airlines. Just about every aspect of flying is a horrifying cluster-fuck. Can't they implement a system that doesn't lose baggage on a semi-regular basis? Yep, and it would be expensive. They focus grouped this shit a long time ago, and found out what consumers are actually willing to pay for when it comes to flying:

1. Keeping the goddamn plane in the air.
2. Having a seat.

People want other things to be nice too, but when push comes to shove, they're not really willing to pay much to make other aspects of the flying experience better. So the airlines cut whatever they can to be price competitive.

I want stable graphics drivers too, but I also don't want to pay more than I absolutely have to for a video card.
 

Re:The actual question

[Opportunist]

What that analogy fails at is that air transport is temporary, while the use of a graphics card is a much more prolonged experience. It's easier to swallow to be considered freight for those 4-12 hours in the air than it is to be constantly fighting against your computer for the 2-3 years the average person clings to their graphics adapter.

Mixed GPUs

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it be nice if the promise of mixed GPUs had arrived already. Then we could buy a new GPU and just add it to the stack we already have. And if the stack is full just drop the worst card out.

Without that I'll probably skip this generation, replacing what I already have for a modest increase is too expensive. Still keeping my fingers crossed that multi-gpu is the way of the future but I'm not holding my breath.

Re:Mixed GPUs

[Fragnet]

Multi-GPU is here now. It's supported by Vulkan and DirectX 12.

Re:Mixed GPUs

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

And DirectX 12 requires the spyware known as Windows 10.

Re:Mixed GPUs

[Fragnet]

Get a life will you. Vulkan is cross-platform.

Re:Mixed GPUs

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Live long and prosper.

Re:Mixed GPUs

[mrchaotica]

Ever since AMD and ATI merged, I've been hoping for socketed GPUs that communicate over HyperTransport. But so far, at least, all we've gotten is APUs instead. : (

Re:Mixed GPUs

[Anonymous Coward]

Vulkan is OpenGL with a new coat of paint (not that that's a bad thing)

Re:Mixed GPUs

[Anonymous Coward]

No it's not, it is much closer to the metal. You only got confused since it's been administered by the same group that creates OpenGL.

Re: Mixed GPUs

[untoreh]

This would be nice... if you have free electricity..

Re:Mixed GPUs

[Blaskowicz]

There's something like that that has been announced
A high end socket with eight memory channels that takes a 32-core Opteron (16+16 MCM) or a 16-core Opteron and GPU with about 2000 units.

Re: Mixed GPUs

[Type44Q]

In other words, another fuckIng APU?

Re:Mixed GPUs

[Anonymous Coward]

:arming tinfoil hats:

Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[johncandale]

Do video card upgrades even matter anymore?

Now days it seems you can run almost any game at high settings with old cards. And the games still don't look as good as old elder school mods, which you need cpu and ram for. Everything is console lvl now.

"muh frames per second are slightly better then your frames per second" is just esat bullshit nowdays when the settings are the same otherwise.

Re: Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

Think VR
90fps minimum, stereo, and high fov

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

For CUDA, these are awesome... memory bandwidth is a problem, but for stuff that runs on a GPU, think 1000x faster than an Intel Xeon.

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[UnknownSoldier]

> Do video card upgrades even matter anymore?

Yes.

* VR requires 90 Hz minimum (Thank god!)
* 4K Gaming at 120 Hz requires beefy hardware.
* ENB mods

If you can't even tell the difference between 24 Hz and 60 Hz ....

OWE my eyes @ 24 fps !

Silky smooth @ 60 fps !

... let alone 120 Hz then obviously you don't need a high end GPU. Continue along with your crappy 30 Hz on consoles. The rest of us will be upgrading.

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

Now days it seems you can run almost any game at high settings with old cards.

You play some very boring games, it seems.

And the games still don't look as good as old elder school mods

I suspect you mean Elder Scrolls, and no, even the highest quality Morrowind mods look like shit compared to current games and mods. And yes, mods require video beef.

Everything is console lvl now.

Oh, I see. Yeah, dude, just buy a console if you want shit tier graphics.

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, try running the new AAA titles on 4K at a stable 60FPS. VR also needs quite a beefy GPU in some cases.

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[kuzb]

Yes, absolutely they matter. Especially with 4k starting to become a serious contender to 1080 in the PC space.

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[TeknoHog]

GPUs are increasingly being used for general purpose computation and rendering, not just playing games. For these purposes more computing power is always welcome, in the same way as faster CPUs and more/faster RAM and storage. For example, would you rather process this data set in 1 day or 2?

The display part won't benefit from indefinite improvements, as the human eye has its limits. But for everything behind the display, there's always more computing to be done.

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[eth1]

Do video card upgrades even matter anymore?

Now days it seems you can run almost any game at high settings with old cards. And the games still don't look as good as old elder school mods, which you need cpu and ram for. Everything is console lvl now.

"muh frames per second are slightly better then your frames per second" is just esat bullshit nowdays when the settings are the same otherwise.

The ONLY reason I'm still running 1920x1200 instead of 4k is that driving the monitor at native resolution for gaming would require too much spent on graphics card hardware.

Most likely, even this new card isn't enough for a single-card setup at 4k.

(says the guy who spent the last week playing Dwarf Fortress...)

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

Will these two new cards be compatible with the HTC Vive?

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[AK Marc]

S an article that people don't notice or care about framerate is your link for complaints about low framerate?

I'm "budget". Though I get people visiting for the first time that ask if my 720 TV is 4k.Gamers trained for years to recognize glitches may notice. Nobody else does. Good lighting, proper setup and wow someone with inferior content.

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[silas_moeckel]

You can push a 4k with a 970 pretty well, you're still paying more for the 4k screen than the 970.

Re: Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[loufoque]

Except that a GPU is not 1000 times faster than a CPU.

Re: Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[Redbehrend]

It's a marketing gimmicks, my friends amd 5770 can run most games still at 60fps haha. IMO The only games that have problems with old cards really are crap works games. I hope Cyberpunk doesn't use it like Witcher 3 did, it did nothing but cause problems.

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

4K is placebo for desktop gaming.

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[MrL0G1C]

I recently bought a nice big 4K Phillips TV... And then sent it back, it was rubbish, the contrast was poor, the colours weren't good, it couldn't handle 4k 60fps properly, the menus were a bad joke, it took about 11 button presses to get to the brightness change setting. There was no backlight control. By default all profiles had 'sharpness' on, god that thing is an abomination that should be banned, why would anyone want to deliberately screw up their picture with it is beyond me.

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

For VR they definitely do. A lot.

Re: Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Sure he can run 60FPS. you just have to turn all the detail down to "complete shit."

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[AK Marc]

That's my finding as well, a high-quality unit well set up is better than a "better spec" unit that's set up less than optimally. My 720p plasma that's 6 years old, gets compliments all the time. I've never talked about it, until someone else brought it up. Whenever I go to the home of a 4k user, I know it. "How do you like my 4k?" If it were any good, you wouldn't have to point it out to everyone.

Re: Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[mrchaotica]

Well, sure, technically it's only half as fast, but 2000 times more parallel.

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[UnknownSoldier]

> My 720p plasma that's 6 years old, gets compliments all the time.

I'm not surprised. Next to OLED, Plasma's superior viewing angles kicks the shit out of LCD's / LED's. Combine that with deep blacks, a good gamut, with a physical black border around the display (old contrast trick) and there isn't even any contest.

Note: I'm a plasma man too. I picked up one of the last 1080p Panny's (TC-P60VT60) right before they went out of stock.

Are you on AvsForum by chance?

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[UnknownSoldier]

Should be; you only need a GTX 970.

RECOMMENDED PC SPECS

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 / AMD Radeon R9 290 equivalent or greater

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, a 970 works fine at 4k for most games. And there's always the option to run at 1080p (or 1440p which isn't as horrible as it sounds).

I have considered upgrading from the 970 to something better, but probably not until mid-2017.

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[AK Marc]

Mine's an LG 55" 3D Plasma. I'm not on AvsForums. I don't really care about it, I just set up my stuff to work the best I can, and noticed the differences in comments between my setup and others'.

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[gustygolf]

If you can't even tell the difference between 24 Hz and 60 Hz ....

OWE my eyes @ 24 fps !

Silky smooth @ 60 fps !

That comparison is faulty, since the most common monitor refresh rate is 60 Hz, which is not evenly divisible by 24 Hz. This will add judder.

It should be a comparison between 30 and 60, or 20 and 60 Hz to make some sense.

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[Exonine]

I personally wouldn't call 60 fps "silky smooth" anymore, After using a 100 fps monitor, watching the 60 fps animation isn't cutting it. Still, I'm not saying 60fps isn't good enough, it sure is better than 30 fps and well enough for a very pleasant gaming experience !

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[UnknownSoldier]

Yeah I really wish RED would add a complete set of framerate demos for:

* 24 Hz
* 30 Hz
* 60 Hz
* 120 Hz
* 144 Hz

The nice thing about using about 120 Hz and 144 Hz refresh is that it is an exact multiple of 24 Hz (5x and 6x, respectively).

I might have to get a HERO4 or some other cheap 240 fps camera and record this demo 120 vs 60 vs 30 fps, but then again we already have 60 Hz vs 120 Hz comparisons.

Re: Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[loufoque]

It's not half as fast neither nor 2000 times as parallel.
Are you just saying random stuff out of your ass?

For double precision, a single Xeon CPU is 500 Gigaflops, while a Pascal GPU is 4 Teraflops (possibly lower for those cards, which are gamer models optimized for single precision).
In practice though, servers use two Xeon CPUs, so the GPU offers you something that is 4 times faster in peak computing power.

Another complication is that, while it's not too complicated to reach close to the max on CPUs, it's very hard to do so on GPUs, in part due to the limited programming model and also due to the tools that are not as good.
You should be happy if you can make your code run 2 to 3 times faster on a GPU.

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[BadgerRush]

Here you go:

https://frames-per-second.apps...

That is a simple JS app that lets you compare frame rates controlling all aspects (I love how it lets you even configure motion blur settings). For me the best comparison (on my 60fps monitor) is 60fps vs 30 fps both without any motion blur, the quality difference is so blatant that I can't imagine like people still defend frame rates lower than 60fps.

Re: Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

God I wish people would stop saying that. It's completely untrue.

Everything I've converted from C++ (CPU) to OpenCL (GPU) has seen a ten-fold increase in performance straight away, before applying any platform-specific optimisation. After tweaking operators & algorithms to favour the GPU's strengths the performance gains creep up to 50x or even 100x. This is precisely because it's easier to reach theoretical maximum performance on a GPU than it is on a CPU, because both the tools and the platform are designed that way.

If you're only getting 2x or 3x speed increases you're doing it wrong. It's not my business to tell you to stop doing it wrong, but stop assuming everyone else is doing it wrong.

Re:Do video card upgrades even matter anymore

[PingSpike]

You could run half/half resolution for perfect scaling and still get 4K desktop.

Well crud

[Elledan]

Time to upgrade from this now totally obsolete, highly OCed GTX 980 Ti, I guess. The upgrade gods demand their blood sacrifice :)

Re:Well crud

[Anonymous Coward]

980 has higher memory bandwidth than new 1080, so keep it.

The 1080 is built on the 16nm process and thus has better clock speeds and power efficiency though, so if you love compute, maybe its time to make that blood sacrifice.

Re:Well crud

[sexconker]

Wait for reviews. Based on the chart they showed, I predict that the 1080 GTX is only 15-20% better than a typical non-reference 980 Ti in the $600-$700 range.
If you have a 980 Ti with high clocks you should just wait for the presumed 1080 Ti / Titan Whatever and AMD's Vega.

Buying the non-flagship part is a sucker's game.

Re: Well crud

[Kjella]

Meh, the flagship typically has the worst price/performance. But it's rare that it is worth trading down in the lineup, if you have last generation's flagship stick with it or buy a new flagship.

Re:Well crud

[Anonymous Coward]

Less than the 980 Ti, more than the 980.

980: 220 GB/s
980 Ti: 336.5 GB/s
1080: 320 GB/s

Re:Well crud

[Elledan]

I got the MSI Seahawk version of the GTX 980 Ti. It's (probably still) the fastest GTX 980 Ti out there, with the integrated watercooling keeping things cool. I think I'll be fine with it for another year or two at least.

It'll be interesting to see how much of an improvement Pascal will be relative to the previous gen of Nvidia GPUs, in particular among the flagship models. The 1080 Ti better be amazing with what they have been promising :)

time

[Gravis Zero]

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang claimed the new GeForce GTX 1080 is faster than a pair of GeForce GTX 980 cards in SLI and faster than the company's very expensive Titan X graphics card but at half the price.

that's nice but it doesn't help me 13 months ago. also, if we're being honest here, this is more of an indicator that they charge too much for their products.

Glad I waited..

[GrBear]

I just put together an i7 6700k and 32GB of DDR4 system together. I'm glad I held off on buying dedicated GPU for the moment (mostly due to the cost of the 980Ti)

Re:Glad I waited..

[MrL0G1C]

I don't see the point of having 32GB of ram, games won't use it, do you have some special application that will use it?

Re: Glad I waited..

[Anonymous Coward]

I upgraded to 32 from 16 cus one of my applications started to crasch becus lack of memory. Have yet had that software crasch after the upgrade time for some bigger data sets i think :-)

Re:Glad I waited..

[PIBM]

- 640K ought to be enough for anybody!

Also rocking 32gb, games, multiboxing, vms, compiling stuff, whatever, currently having 21GB in active use..

Re:Glad I waited..

[GrBear]

I run a 8GB ram drive for my browser cache to cut down on unnecessary SSD usage... as well as a VM for testing various Linux distros.

Re:Glad I waited..

[the_bard17]

X-Plane 10, with AIPilotX's HD Mesh v3 and the Massachusetts Pro VFR Scenery will eat up 32 GB of RAM easily.

Flight simulation is one of those areas where I doubt there will ever be such a thing as enough memory. There's always something to model in greater detail.

Re:Glad I waited..

[MindPrison]

I don't see the point of having 32GB of ram, games won't use it, do you have some special application that will use it?

I have a lot of Apps that more than need it, I do 3D graphics a lot and Blender loves memory, the more memory - the happier the renderer. And I also do a lot of video editing for my Youtube show - here I would actually love 64 GB ram...can't get enough ram, seriously. Remember - the video files you guys see are COMPRESSED - when you edit video live and REAL time - you have to have the memory for all that RAW video in the memory.

Re:Glad I waited..

[Anonymous Coward]

IDK about that. I recently doubled my ram from 16 to 32($53 for 2x8 GB is amazing) and I experienced better load times a lot in a game. Specifically I would go from Area A to Area B, then returning to Area A the reload was lightning fast because it didn't get pushed out of RAM. It's little things like that.

Re:Glad I waited..

[Anonymous Coward]

I too got myself an i7 6700k and 32GB DDR (planning on ordering another 32GB any day now), but I got a GTX 970 with it. CPUs and memory really seem to have plateaued, so I went big on that front. But GPUs, you'd have to be either very shortsighted or a hardcore enthusiast to go "bleeding edge". I'm also feeling pretty nice right about now.

So no HBM 2 memory for consumers?

[ffkom]

Let's see what AMD will say about that. And whether there will be usable open source drivers (for either manufacturers 2016 GPU lineup).

Re:So no HBM 2 memory for consumers?

[aliquis]

Let's see what AMD will say about that. And whether there will be usable open source drivers (for either manufacturers 2016 GPU lineup).

I can promise(..) you AMD won't release a single GPU Polaris 10 graphics card with HBM 2 right now.

Both companies will likely release theirs in 2017.

Re:So no HBM 2 memory for consumers?

[aliquis]

Or well, with 2017 I mean "later."
Neither of them will release HBM 2 cards this summer.
And AMD Polaris 10 may not keep up with the fastest of the Nvidia cards.

You'll have to wait for the replacement of the Fury cards.

Re:So no HBM 2 memory for consumers?

[Lonewolf666]

It seems there won't be much competition in the 2016 GPU lineups:
  - AMD is doing small to medium chips, their 2016 Polaris line will cover notebooks and midrange desktop GPUs.
  - Nvidia is doing fairly high end chips at higher prices.
In 2016, some people might ask themselves if they want "Polaris 10" (the bigger of the AMD chips) or spend more money on the the GTX 1070. But for most the choice will be easy.

2017 will be more interesting, with AMD Vega competing against the just released GTX 1080. Also, AMD Vega will probably have HBM 2 memory.

Re:So no HBM 2 memory for consumers?

[aliquis]

2017 will be more interesting, with AMD Vega competing against the just released GTX 1080. Also, AMD Vega will probably have HBM 2 memory.

Except Nvidia will likely release the 1080Ti with HBM2 memory and will release Volta towards the end of the year and then what?

2016 already was supposed to be interesting. This is what we have. Don't expect more from 2017.

1080 versus 980 TI

[NormAtHome]

I've been saving to buy a 980 TI but this is kind of interesting.

So is this 1080 faster for less money than the 980 TI? I'm looking at one manufacturers specs for the 1080 versus their 980 TI (overclocked edition) and it looks like the 1080 has more memory and higher clock speeds but also less cuda cores.

I'm going to be interested to see what the end users reviews are when it's available.

Re:1080 versus 980 TI

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on what I've seen, no. It's more expensive.. and probably about the same performance? Lower wattage at least. I guess that's why the compare it with the X or the 980.

If it was twice the speed and half the price, it'd be $270 and get a 22,000 score on this:
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

Leaked passmark scores have it at about 10,102

Re:1080 versus 980 TI

[NormAtHome]

I'm always skeptical about new products and how good they are purported to be before the actual release, but you're saying the 1080 is about the same performance for more money? Yet EndGaget seems to be saying "GTX 1080 GPU is faster than Titan X" and I thought the Titan X was faster than the 980 TI (although not by much). Also lets take the Gigabyte GTX 980 TI, it's MSRP is like $659.99 and yet Amazon sells it for $594.99, so if the MSRP of a 1080 is $599.99 the retail price should be under $500, that makes it less than the 980 TI?

Pascal Titan?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will there be a Titan version of Pascal, with, say 16 GB memory? I'm waiting to build a Da Vinci Resolve workstation, and can't decide if I should use a GTX 1080 for the UI, and then wait for a Titan version of Pascal for the GPUs (two of them).

Re:Pascal Titan?

[Blaskowicz]

It's been indicated that big Pascal is for HPC only, because the HBM2 availability is not there yet. I suppose they plan to sell what they can make at very high margins and that's all.

Re:Pascal Titan?

[Anonymous Coward]

But they currently have the Titan at much lower cost than a Tesla, since rendering isn't as demanding as other HPC uses.

So, is there gonna be a Titan version for Da Vinci Resolve type uses? The 12 GB on the Titan is critical for certain Resolve uses. Resolve will certainly need more than 8 GB, but people are not going to want to pay up for a Tesla version just to use Resolve.

I don't think HBM2 is available yet

[Sycraft-fu]

At least not in any commercial quantity. So a company can't release a card with it for retail sales since they just couldn't make it. All they could do is a paper announcement, as nVidia did with their compute Pascal. If AMD wishes to launch a card soon, it will likely have to either use GDDR5(X) or HBM1 since there just aren't the HBM2 modules out there for it.

Remember there's a non-trivial lag time between a company developing a technology and managing to produce it on a commercial scale.

Why such power hogs?

[Lawrence_Bird]

In an age where most CPUs have TDP of 65W or less, why does it seem every add on graphics card has TDP that starts at 65W and goes up to 250-400W?

Re:Why such power hogs?

[Kartu]

Well,look at it max power as a limiting factor.
So, you can clock chip to consume less (and be slower).
Or up clocks and consume more (by the way, both 10xx cards consume more than predecessor) but bring more performance.

PS
970 launched at 329$
1070 is launching at 379$
There we go again.

Re:Why such power hogs?

[Blaskowicz]

For example a 65-watt card may have 640 processing units while a 250-watt card with the same tech or almost the same might have 3072 processing units.
It's as if Intel sold you a 20-core consumer CPU that uses up to 250 watts, which they don't but that would be physically possible.

Re:Why such power hogs?

[Agripa]

CPU power dissipation is limited by semiconductor die size unless junction temperature is increased which lowers operating life and reliability. Since about the start of the Core2 series, CPU die sizes are dropped so power has had to drop as well. GPU makers use a different trade off sacrificing operating life and reliability for performance so while they do use larger semiconductor die sizes, they use even higher power levels. In this respect AMD and nVidia have been in a race to the bottom with nVidia leading.

One of the first things I look for in a GPU is low operating temperature because I got tired of GPUs failing at about 2 years.

Re:Why such power hogs?

[Lawrence_Bird]

The bottom line is you need a 500+ watt PSU to service your video card, not the rest of the pc. It is crazy.

Re:Why such power hogs?

[Agripa]

For reliability reasons, the power supply should be significantly derated anyway. The manufacturers have gotten really good at designing them so that they fail just out of warranty because the aluminum electrolytic capacitors wear out.

Is it really that fast?

[drinkypoo]

I've seen a bunch of reports that a typically-overclocked GTX 960 is just as fast as the GTX 1080. Are those people just blowing smoke? Or is nVidia just jerking off here?

Where is the ATi offering?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now Nvidia has announced its 16nm GPU, where is ATi's 16nm lineup?

C'mon, we users need to see some competition here!

Great - In 2 years I'll have a Linux driver for it

[MindPrison]

I remember when I read that the 980 had just been supported by Linux...heh...that's when I still had a 760, kinda happy I didn't buy a 980 since it got CUDA support so late. I love the speed of the 1080 - but since I use Linux exclusively for 3D rendering and Video editing, I'm going to hold off until there's decent support for it.

1080gtx

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure a 1080ti will come out with hbm2 if you want to wait.I wish amd well and hope there new cards are a good value.the 1080 seems to be such a big leap forward anyone with less than a fury x or 980ti can't go wrong