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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.
Spend $20k on a car, nobody bats an eyelid at you spending another few k on fancy wheels, styling, etc. waxing the thing three times a week or whatever.
Spend $0.7k on a graphics card that forms a major component of your work, entertainment, gaming system once every few years and everyone thinks you're a "nerd".
I spent more than that on a laptop with much less graphic capability and - nearly five years down the line - it's still used EVERY SINGLE DAY for work, then in the evening for watching TV or movies and checking email and gaming, and goes on holiday with me too. Literally, GTA V on the move.
I'm not saying I'd buy this card in particular, but if someone does, that's nothing compared to the money pissed away on iPhones, cars, sports fan paraphenalia, designer clothes, etc. which are all in exactly the same category
I remember my brother paying GBP 1000 for a RAM upgrade. To 4Mb. Back when computers could barely cope with that amount of RAM. For running FORTRAN calculations from a floppy disk.
By comparison a graphics card that you could see bundled in a $1500 gaming setup is nothing. And this is a LAUNCH price. It won't be long before those cards are only a few hundred $.
Everything about this screams "rob Vega of its momentum". Judging by the price and specs, this is probably only slightly above "loss leader" territory.
Another example of competition being good for the end-users. The first round of high-end Pascal cards (1070/1080/Titan) frankly looked a bit over-priced relative to their performance increase over the previous generation, but then AMD just didn't have a viable high-end offering at the time. I'd struggle to persuade myself to buy an AMD card after previous driver woes with them, but I'm relieved to see them looking like they're about to get back into the game.
The smart money is waiting for Vega.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
> Who in their right mind spends that much for a video card? Seriously, I want to know.
Questioning is fine -- but your tone makes you look clueless instead of being inquisitive.
I'll give you 4 reasons why I buy cards like this:
1. You're assuming ONLY gamers buy this card, which is incomplete, but I'll discuss this first. I prefer to game at 120+ Hz . I settle for 60 Hz at 2560x1440 (or higher). Graphics Cards are STILL too slow to run 4Ka, aka 2160p at 120 Hz. VR is still a performance hog. You'll want at least a nVidia 980 to get a great VR experience.
2. I do CUDA programming on my nVidia cards. It sounds like you don't understand what heterogeneous programming is.
* GPU's are fast and inflexible.
* CPU's are slow and flexible.
Offloading selective work from the CPU to the GPU dramatically reduces processing time. GPUs have THOUSANDS of "cores" compared to the piddly "8-core" of CPUs. The cost per core of a typical i7 is $300 / 8 = ~$37. The 1080 Ti is $700 / 3,584 = ~ $0.19. Obviously this is an Apples-to-Oranges comparison but depending on _what_ kind of work your doing this could be EXTREMELY cost effective.
I still have an original Titan in my Linux dev box that I paid $1,000 because it has 1:3 float64 performance compared to the butchered 1:24 float64 performance of later cards -- Translation: For 64-bit floating point the original Titan SCREAMED -- each 64-bit floating point operation was only 1/3 as fast as a 32-bit float. Later video cards butchered the performance so 64-bit floats to be only 1/24 as fast.
3. Game developers, namely programmer and artists, which overlaps with my next point.
4. Graphics programmers, graphic gurus, and "shader junkies" like me buy cards like this -- that is anyone doing real-time rendering, or "pre-viz" work in the movie industry, also has an eye on getting hold of the fastest GPU's they can get. I don't know what GPU's was used in Avatar but they used a total of ...
* 4,000 computers
* 40,000 CPUs
Anytime you need the ability to preview _complex_ rendering (shading / lighting) a faster GPU will help. You then distribute it to thousands of CPU's to do the actual rendering.
You would be less myopic if you would open your eyes to what people are doing with real-time pixel shaders these day. The site ShaderToy is extremely well known amongst us graphics programmers.
* "Wet Stone"
* Mario
Modern GPUs completely S-U-C-K for non-volumetric rendering. Using ray-marching is the standard "solution" to get great looking effects.
It would behoove you to read:
* Rendering Worlds with Two Triangles with raytracing on the GPU
* Clouds
Now I'm quite happy with my Titan and 980 Ti but others will be looking to upgrade. Whenever you upgrade you want to move up at least 3 tiers.
* Desktop GPU Performance Hierarchy Table
Instead of criticizing people for buying the fastest thing they can afford it would be more productive to open your eyes for how much computers are STILL d-o-g slow for graphics.
--
"One does not fully appreciate just how complicated reality is until one starts trying to simulate it."