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NVIDIA Unveils Its $700 Top of the Line GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Graphics Card (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes from a report via HotHardware: NVIDIA just lifted the veil on its latest monster graphics card for gamers -- the long-rumored GeForce GTX 1080 Ti -- at an event this evening in San Francisco during the Game Developers Conference (GDC). The card will sit at the top of NVIDIA's GeForce offering with the Titan X and GeForce GTX 1080 in NVIDIA's Pascal-powered product stack, promising significant performance gains over the GTX 1080 and faster than Titan X performance, for a much lower price of $699. The 12 billion NVIDIA GP102 transistor on the card has 3,584 CUDA cores, which is actually the same as NVIDIA's Titan X. However, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti will have fewer ROP units at 88, versus 96 in the Titan X. The 1080 Ti will also, however, come equipped with 11GB of premium GDDR5X memory from Micron clocked at 11,000 MHz for an effective 11Gbps data rate. Peak compute throughput of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is slightly higher than the Titan X due to the Ti's higher boost clock. Memory bandwidth over its narrower 352-bit GDDR5 memory interface is 484GB/s, which is also slightly higher than a Titan X as well. NVIDIA also noted that peak overclocks on the core should hit 2GHz or higher with minimal coaxing. As a result, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti will be faster than the Titan X out of the box, faster still when overclocked.
Some people go to a couple movies a month. $50 a month, easy, with tickets and concessions. More if you're not alone. Others go cycling on a $2000 cycle. Some hit the bar... $30 a night (or more).
And others buy an expensive video card so they can play the newest games at the best settings. Seriously... you're right it'll be obsolete in a couple years, but are you simultaneously making fun of what everyone does on their time off? That tequila shot costs $8 and all you get is a buzz for half an hour.
You may not like gaming. That's fine. You might not have a lot of money lying around. Also fine. But millions of people spend much more than the cost of that video card every few months on their personal past-times and hobbies. A gaming computer, especially one built yourself, is a pretty inexpensive investment to play games that you can't get anywhere else.
There are thousands of games you can only play on a computer, and dozens of AAA titles every year that just don't work on any other platform. A console is not a substitute for a PC for many gamers. It's not worse... it's just different. Stop being a hobby bigot. :-) Let people enjoy their technology any way they like it.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Most people spend more on their phone. Or on food. Or vacationing. This is just another form of entertainment to budget for, are you really too myopic to see that?
For people who want to use VR, or who have a 4K screen, or have a 144Hz monitor, you literally can't get by on anything but high-end. Display tech is outpacing graphics cards right now.
"Seriously, I want to know. Unless you are a trust fund PC master race worshiper, why would you sink 2x the cost of a console into a card that will be obsolete in a year or two?"
That's like a beggar wondering why the people walking past them would spend $20 on underwear, when the beggar knows you can achieve much the same results if you spend $2 on a towel and some safety pins.
Also, if you think $700 is "trust fund" money, you're not going to like the fact that most people have clothes collections worth $1000's, cars worth $10,000's and houses worth $100,000's.
It blows me away how on a geek/tech site every time there is a new high end hardware announcement you have people shitting on it and proclaiming they can't understand how anyone would spend money on it. Really? You can't understand how computers are a hobby for people and some people are willing to spend lots of money on their hobby? I mean $700 isn't even that expensive for many hobbies. Get in to auto racing and you'd be happy when some part is "only" $700.
Really I think it isn't that people can't understand, rather it is sour grapes. The grandparent can't afford to get an expensive card like this and rather than just be able to say "well, this isn't a toy for me" they feel the need to hate on it and act like anyone who can afford it and decides to buy it is stupid.
Yes, it is expensive. It is nVidia's flagship video card. They always are because they can be (and because they are expensive to make). No, you don't need one to play games. A mid range 1060 will do plenty fine. However some people have the money, and wish to have the high performance. That is not hard to understand and not something to get mad about. If it isn't for you, just move on with your life.
All the jealousy in this thread. Look, scrub, if you can't afford it, don't bitch about people who can. Do you also rant about people buying nice cars, or big houses? Maybe you stand outside posh restaurants and berate the people going in, because after all they could just go buy a Big Mac, right?
I'll be buying one. First in the queue.
But then I'm a well-paid professional whose main hobby is gaming and who can afford to splash out on something like this once in a while, while still paying the mortgage, racking up savings etc. I like having all the latest bells and whistles. If I'm going to spend a good chunk of my leisure time doing something, I'd like to do it well.
Gaming can be an expensive hobby, sure. But so can lots of other hobbies. Guy I've known since my late teens is seriously into mountaineering. He got pretty rich during his 20s (combination of being smart, hardworking and in the right place at the right time) then downshifted into a job with an employer who was fine with him taking big chunks of time off. In previous years, he's vanished for 2-3 month chunks of time to Alaska and the Andes. Later this year, he'll be doing his first Himalayan trip. All-inclusive cost for that trip alone is close to $100k (which, given he's British like me, is rather more money than it used to be since Brexit). All of which is to spend a few months cold and miserable in a tent, with no guarantee of a successful summit and a non-trivial chance of dying. Not my cup of tea at all. But that's what he likes to do and he has the money to do it, so frankly it's his business (and his stories are fun, in a hair-raising way).
Even leaving the more extreme hobbies aside, lots of people still sink sums into fairly normal activities that are not out of line with what I spend on gaming. My dad's a golfer and, between membership fees, trips, new clubs, training sessions and all of the assorted gadgets that seem to go with the sport, he likely racks up more on that than I do on gaming. But that's fine; he can afford it without making stupid compromises elsewhere in his life
Cars? I'm friends with a petrolhead at work who spends a fortune on them (his own estimate to me was £10,000 per annum on average, albeit with peaks and troughs), despite the fact that other than a track day every couple of months, his latest road-going rally-monster spends most of its time on supermarket runs. Good god, I know cyclists (the pedal kind, not the motorised kind) who spend more on their bikes than I spend on my PC.
Short version; what adults do with their own disposable income is their own business, provided they aren't inconveniencing anybody else with it. Different things will appeal to different people.