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.

Comments

$700 GTFO

[LeftCoastThinker]

Who in their right mind spends that much for a video card? 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?

Some people seem to have completely lost sight of the whole point of playing games: it is to have fun...

Re:$700 GTFO

[iamacat]

People who have money to spare (TM)

What else did you expect? A card for half the price will play your fun game at 1080p/60hz while your rich friends enjoy 4K/120Hz. And yes, there is barely any difference.

Re:$700 GTFO

[Psion]

Some of that extra processing power is useful for more than just games. Blender, for example, is a 3D modelling, animation, and rendering package that will use the CUDA cores in these graphics cards to drastically speed up rendering calculations. This can be tremendously useful to someone doing 3D graphics or video editing.

Re:$700 GTFO

[Iamthecheese]

If it's like all the other top tier video cards' histories it will still be playing new games at high levels in two years, and at mid to low levels for at least eight years. You don't get to call it obsolete until it's just not worth using anymore for its original purpose. I'm not saying it's worth $700 a pop, but it won't be obsolete in one or two (or three or four) years.

Re:$700 GTFO

[JanneM]

It (or the Quadro version) will find itself in high-end workstations, and the card is probably also very reasonable as a lower-cost GPGPU accelerator.

Re:$700 GTFO

[The Raven]

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.

Re:$700 GTFO

[kamapuaa]

And what percent of GTX 1080 users need their Blender to render faster? Because I would guess it's somewhere below 1%. These are first and foremost for games, and they happen to have a few other use cases.

Re:$700 GTFO

[PhrostyMcByte]

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.

Re:$700 GTFO

[kiviQr]

Are we talking again about these poor people from Silicon Valley barely making a living on $160k/y???

Re:$700 GTFO

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone's got to fund the next round of cards, and it might as well be the idiots with too much money.

Re:$700 GTFO

[kronix1986]

"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.

Re:$700 GTFO

[epyT-R]

Who in their right mind spends thousands on bar hopping, sports tickets, and overpriced branded clothing?

To each his own.

Re:$700 GTFO

[ledow]

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 $.

Re:$700 GTFO

[Chas]

Because, unlike a console, the card will stay relevant longer.

Re:$700 GTFO

[GuB-42]

- Some people just have money and think it is worth it.
- It won't be obsolete in 1 or 2 years. After that it won't be the best anymore but it will keep being a very good GPU for quite a few years after that.
- People spend an awful lot of money for having fun.
- GPUs are not only for games, and in some cases (esport, streaming, ...) games can be serious business. This is an edge case but $700 GPUs are an edge case too.

Re:$700 GTFO

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:$700 GTFO

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:$700 GTFO

[stud9920]

why would you sink 2x the cost of a console into a card that will be obsolete in a year or two?

As a matter of fact, GPU makers do manage to milk their product line over a long period. Any x70 of generations 6-10 still outperform recent generation x50 or x60, which themselves allow decent playable gameplay at a mid-range resolution (1080p/60? ).

So if you bought a 670 in 2011 for $700, you're NOT beating me with my $150, 3 year renewal policy for x50, but I'm only a casual gamer with other expensive hobbies and I'm satisfied with playing old AAA games on sale on Steam (Gaming was already good enough 10 years ago and 10 year old games are not obsolete).

Re:$700 GTFO

[gravewax]

It is too expensive for me, but fuck man it is still far better value than consoles if you care about high quality graphics or VR. consoles are for those that are happy to settle for less or simply can't afford the best. (I use both a console and PC for gaming, obviously PC's are superior in almost every aspect for gaming except cost and a few console exclusives)

Re:$700 GTFO

[RogueyWon]

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.

Re:$700 GTFO

[Ash-Fox]

People who have money to spare (TM)

I just get a 0% APR creditcard for 12 months and pay it back over the course of a year?

A card for half the price will play your fun game at 1080p/60hz while your rich friends enjoy 4K/120Hz.

If that's all you use it for, likely sufficient, yes. Although, when I already see performance issues in Star Citizen on the current 1080... I'm not sure at how much of a disadvantage those players will be at in the near future.

And yes, there is barely any difference.

Honestly, when you do a few more things with multiple 1080p monitors, run a couple of games at the same time, do a little streaming, a bit of video encoding work, a bit of 3d modelling etc. You tend to notice the limitations of hardware.

Re:$700 GTFO

[AchilleTalon]

Probably the same who are spending over $1000 on a pair of skis or $30000 on a motorboat or $15000 on an hot air balloon or $50000 on car tuning or ...

Re:$700 GTFO

[Ash-Fox]

will be obsolete in a year or two?

When I bought my 780, and at the time (2013?), it wasn't nowhere even the best card and it's still not obsolete...

why would you sink 2x the cost of a console

Because as someone that has all the current generation consoles and just pre-ordered the Nintendo Switch, I don't see why I shouldn't have a graphics card for my PC that works well? I feel the limitations of my current graphics card and as someone that drives multiple monitors with a single graphics card, runs multiple games at times, does a little streaming, a little video encoding, a little 3d work - I just don't see why I shouldn't?

Some people seem to have completely lost sight of the whole point of playing games: it is to have fun...

Maybe it's just me, but I don't really want to play Star Citizen at 20FPS because I find the performance and framerate stutter to actually break my immersion and makes controlling the game frustrating. I don't like playing Final Fantasy XIV on my PS4 because the performance tends to drop significantly in raids when lots of effects are firing off and I am having to reduce my graphical options in order to make it managable at which point my enjoyment is diminished because even despite that, I find the frame drops and stutters really annoying...

There are games out there that will do fine on limited hardware doing few things. But, those games for some reason are of little interest to me and I genuinely don't find them fun.

Who in their right mind spends that much for a video card?

Me and I don't get your logic, it's flawed.

Re:$700 GTFO

[mccalli]

Agree except for the iPhone bit (or high-end Android phone , it's not a platform war I'm describing). That has exactly the same rationale as the the high end graphics card - if I'm going to be using something constantly, then I want the best/fastest/most functional/. A high-end phone rather than el cheapo is exactly the kind of choice that getting the high-end graphics card is, if you actually plan on using the capabilities they have.

Re: $700 GTFO

[bronney]

They are 12 year old kiddies who can't wrap their head around that figure when they can buy 2 ps4. Why one 1080 ti?

But if you're like me who pays 1500 rent every month. 700 is spare change tbh. Don't even need to be rich to do it. As parents said. It's just phone price.

Re:$700 GTFO

[thegarbz]

So fun and money are exclusive opposites? You better tell people who buy boats about your theory.

Re:$700 GTFO

[CptLoRes]

Just replace video card with car (and add a lot more money) or pretty much anything else and you have your answer. People with an expensive hobby, and money to spend.

Re:$700 GTFO

[arth1]

Who in their right mind spends that much for a video card? Seriously, I want to know.

You must be a young guy.
This is cheap compared to what we used to pay for PC components. High end graphics cards used to cost north of $1000, and that they've come down this much in price while being thousands of times as powerful is just great. Then there's inflation. $700 these days isn't nearly as much as $700 was a few decades ago.
You get a lot more for your money these days.

Re:$700 GTFO

[Anonymous Coward]

Who in their right mind spends that much for a video card? 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?

Some people seem to have completely lost sight of the whole point of playing games: it is to have fun...

I'm an AI researcher, and I regularly buy Titan-X's for my company. Titan-X's cost a few hundred more than these new 1080 Ti cards. Compared to some more expensive Nvidia cards (eg. P6k), $700 is pretty cheap.

For the record, I would never buy something like this for video games.

Re:$700 GTFO

[DingerX]

No offense, but I'm not sure that the low framerates of Star Citizen is what makes the experience immersion-breaking and frustrating.

Re:$700 GTFO

[gTsiros]

if i had a job, i'd buy *two*, not just one.

i don't spend money on anything "extra" besides the bare essentials. My main vehicle is a 20 year old motorbike i got for $1500 with 30k miles on it.

and if you compare a top-tier gpu with a console, you're really out of touch

Re:$700 GTFO

[Phydeaux314]

This. 1440p / 144hz is pretty much the place to be for high-end PC gaming these days. 4K support - both from a hardware and software perspective - is spotty at the moment, while 1440p@144 is both well supported by applications and can be powered without selling your first-born child or running multiple GPUs.

As for complaining about the cost... dropping $2500 for mid/high end PC every 5 years isn't that high as far as hobby spending goes, especially if said PC is your primary form of entertainment. Hell, there are people with cars as a hobby that spend more than that on fuel.

Re:$700 GTFO

[Truekaiser]

People who save up for it, get it, then run it into the ground for the next 5 or six years.

Re:$700 GTFO

[squiggleslash]

It's not bad an investment if:

1. You have a multimonitor set-up.
2. You don't intend to replace it for 10 years.
3. You want something powerful enough for whatever it is that's in at the moment. Right now that's VR I guess.

Source: I know people who spent that kind of money on graphics cards over 10 years ago, and are finally considering upgrading.

Me? I have a single 1080p monitor and have no problems upgrading a $100 card every 5 years. So I'm not the target market, but I don't begrudge those who are.

Re:$700 GTFO

[The Real Dr John]

I built gaming computers for years, and top of the line video cards do not become obsolete in a year or two, just like consoles don't. Maybe 5 years (2-3 upgrade cycles), and at that point you are down to under $150 a year for gaming with a really nice video card. My GTX 980 is not obsolete, but it is several years old. If gaming is what you do with your spare time, then I don't see that being prohibitively expensive. I usually avoid the super high end parts because there is almost always something at a much better price/performance ratio available. Compared with consoles, high end PCs are a completely different and superior gaming platform if you can afford one. Everyone has different preferences, and consoles provide very good performance for their price range. I much prefer playing games on PCs.

Re:$700 GTFO

[GerardAtJob]

Both is much better tho.

Re:$700 GTFO

[Kjella]

Flamebait? Guess the truth hurts.

PS3: 0.40 TFLOPS
PS4: 1.84 TFLOPS
PS4 Pro: 4.2 TFLOPS
Guesstimate for PS5 if PS4 Pro is half-gen: (1.84/0.4)*1.84 = 8.5 to (4.2/1.84)*4.2 = 9.6 TFLOPS
Gefore 1080 Ti: 11.5 TFLOPS

It's a 474mm^2, 250W beast... don't expect to see similar performance in a console any time soon.

Re:$700 GTFO

[Holi]

Then medical marijuana??? Video games aren't THAT good yet.

Re:$700 GTFO

[Anonymous Coward]

What good is "running a couple of games at the same time". Regardless of graphical or computing power, only the active program will be getting input.

Re:$700 GTFO

[Holi]

"This card will do 4K at Ultra quality with flying colors"

in what game?

Re:$700 GTFO

[DontBeAMoran]

No, those people don't have enough money and are stuck playing games with Intel's integrated GPU.

Re: $700 GTFO

[Type44Q]

. Hugely diminishing returns past $1.5k.

That depends entirely on the app in question and how you're using it. Anyhiw, next-gen VR headsets could very well show significant benefit from a pair of such cards tied together with NVLink... and there's your $1500.

Re:$700 GTFO

[twdorris]

Others go cycling on a $2000 cycle.

I wish it were only a $2000 cycle... Point taken.

Re:$700 GTFO

[DontBeAMoran]

Wouldn't it be better to buy something at half the price but twice as often? You won't save any money but you'll always be playing at the high end of medium settings.

Re:$700 GTFO

[Bigbutt]

Meh. I bought a pair of GTX 970's last March. It had been 8 years since I built my previous not quite top of the line gaming capable system. This time I also bought a 4k 43" monitor to go with my pair of 23" Acer's.

I'm not all that much of a current gamer. My recent gaming has been the old Carmagedden or original Doom and Doom II games.

I do a lot of hacking about with tech stuff though so having 3 or 4 cygwin windows open for coding or configuations, along with a web browser, movie or tv show playing, couple of log watch cygwin windows open, and recently a couple of movie ripping windows, makes creating stuff a whole lot easier.

The two cards cost almost $700 :)

http://carl.schelin.org/?p=960

[John]

Re:$700 GTFO

[UnknownSoldier]

> 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

... just to render ONE frame that lasted 1 / 24th of a second ! I'm willing to bet they did a LOT of pre-visualization rendering work to get the scenes looking "just right"

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."

Re:$700 GTFO

[drinkypoo]

I remember my brother paying GBP 1000 for a RAM upgrade. To 4Mb.

GBP 1000 for 4 megabits? Was it bubble core?

Re:$700 GTFO

[Lab Rat Jason]

I wish I had mod points for you good A/C. In my world, $700 doesn't buy very much, so the relative value of this card is pretty high! And as others have already pointed out in this thread, there are uses besides gaming. I'm looking at buying a pair for running an Inception instance under TensorFlow. Not everyone is here for the gaming, and these cards are phenomenal middle of the road compute cards... if the proof of concept works out, we will of course be buying much more expensive cards (like in the 24gb range) for production, but for prototyping, this is pretty awesome!

Re:$700 GTFO

[jason777]

I currently run a geforce 1080 overclocked a bit with my 1920x1200 monitor. I'm in the market for the new HDR 4k monitors coming out this year. Anyways, In Grand Theft Auto 5, I have all the settings at mostly ultra setting. For the most part, I get a solid 60fps, but here and there a bit of frame drop, but not that bad. I will be absolutely trading up to the 1080ti once it comes out, and those monitors are out.

Re:$700 GTFO

[jason777]

Yeah, and $700 is dirt cheap for this consider I just spent $640 on a 1080 and the Titan is $1200. Besides, the PS4 Pro isnt real 4k. The extra fre hundres is totally worth it, and the PC is used for many other things, for me anyways. My overclocked 6700k is used for software development, video processing, and music recording.

Re:$700 GTFO

[Phydeaux]

I've got a Chemistry professor who is planning on purchasing one for chemical modelling. Cuts the time by 60% and apparently completely worth the extra expense....

Re:$700 GTFO

[KingMotley]

Me, but the card is hardly obsolete in a year or two. I'll upgrade my main machine's video card every 2-3 years, and then swap it's old card to my secondary machine (Development box and server), which then moves it's old video card to a third machine. Sometimes my secondary machine doesn't need the upgrade, in which case it goes up on eBay for $200-$400. Which then turns the purchase into either 3 upgrades every 2-3 years for $700, or $300-$500 every 2-3 years if I eBay the old card.

Why would you buy a console whose video card and CPU are obsolete a year before you even buy it?

Re:$700 GTFO

[Khyber]

Uhh, we were doing 1536 horizontal lines at 120+ Hz back in the days of Quake 3. What's the excuse for languishing for almost 20 damned years, and REGRESSING to 1080 horizontal lines halfway through that time frame?

Re:$700 GTFO

[ooloorie]

GPUs are used extensively in artificial intelligence, physics, and other applications these days.

Even for computer graphics, you need that kind of power for VR and for high quality physics simulations.

Also, the big difference between the 1080 and the 1080 Ti is probably not the modest increase in speed, but the extra memory.

Re:$700 GTFO

[vel-ex-tech]

Y'all are going to have a difficult time getting a nice high off medical marijuana. CBD isn't psychoactive, and the treatments the psychoactive cannabinoids are useful for (depression and anxiety) are still enshrined in law as things that cannabis can't treat.

I have no idea where you dipshits get this notion that they just hand out medical cards.

But whatever. Get butthurt because somebody is getting high somewhere. I hope it keeps you awake at night.

Re:$700 GTFO

[vel-ex-tech]

I wasn't clear. Your difficulty is going to be the fact that medical strains do not produce much in the way of psychoactive cannabinoids.

But that's me talking like a fag. I hope you all die of alcohol poisoning and heroin overdose.

Re:$700 GTFO

[Ash-Fox]

No offense, but I'm not sure that the low framerates of Star Citizen is what makes the experience immersion-breaking and frustrating.

Your experience my differ, but I know where I am having issues.

Re:$700 GTFO

[Ash-Fox]

What good is "running a couple of games at the same time".

Typically to do something during periods of quietness. Like, waiting for a queue to pop in a raid finder.

Regardless of graphical or computing power, only the active program will be getting input.

Works fine for me? With FFXIV I have a some joystick button bindings that work just fine despite not being an active window?

Re:$700 GTFO

[Ash-Fox]

you need to prioritise your stuff, people are innately terrible at multi-stepping.

Sounds like you're projecting your personal problems on to me. I don't need to do anything.

Re:$700 GTFO

[ranton]

Who in their right mind spends [$700] for a video card? 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?

Who in their right mind spends $5 for a single meal? When some people don't make that much in an entire month?

See how silly your statement really is?

Re:$700 GTFO

[Holi]

Not even close to the majority of medical marijuana is high CBD / low THC.

"I have no idea where you dipshits get this notion that they just hand out medical cards."

Well this "dipshit" has been involved in the medical marijuana industry since it's beginning, so try and be a little less insulting when talking about shit you know nothing about (which is obvious from your response).

Re:$700 GTFO

[Holi]

You really need to have some supporting evidence for a claim like that. Granted you will have a hard time finding any since High CBD content strains are not even close the the majority of strains sold by compassion clinics.

Re:$700 GTFO

[Cederic]

Hmm. I can tell the difference from 1080p to 1440p, and I like it.

I'm driving 1440p with a 1070 at the moment, waiting for this new card. If it can properly drive 4k (at 60fps will do, I don't need 120) then I'll buy it, and a new monitor.

Re:$700 GTFO

[Cederic]

So you can chat with a friend in one while playing the other?
So you can "multi-box" an MMO?
So you can test shit?
Because you're _that_ good?
So you can avoid downtime while waiting for a game to do its thing?
Because they're turnbased online and you're waiting for the other player?

I've been there and done that for all of them.

Re:$700 GTFO

[iamacat]

Absolutely. Half goes to taxes and rent for a townhouse is like $4K/month. Better watch your expenses!

Re:$700 GTFO

[Cederic]

Euro Truck Simulator 2. With mods installed.

Console owners wish they could play games like that, let alone in 4k.

Re:$700 GTFO

[LeftCoastThinker]

Fair enough, for business, if it makes business sense and is more profitable, then I can see that making sense. I thought that industry primarily used the Quadro line, but I can see for game devs and the other areas of industry where it makes sense. Good, well argued response, thank you.

Re:$700 GTFO

[HumanWiki]

Who in their right mind spends that much for a video card? 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?

Some people seem to have completely lost sight of the whole point of playing games: it is to have fun...

Well, for some of us. Spending 700.00 on something like that isn't an issue. I know plenty of people that spend that kind of money on a 1 time sporting event, concert, etc. and that's only a one time use. While the 1080Ti won't be top-dog for long, it's not going to be useless in 1 calendar year. I just upgraded from a 970GTX to a 1070GTX for my HTC VR rig, but had been using my 970 for years now and it was just fine.

Re:$700 GTFO

[ranton]

$2.5k on a PC is throwing money in the wind. I could get you 90% of the performance for 50% of the price. Hugely diminishing returns past $1.5k.

It is quite common for the best of the best to "only" be 10% better for twice the price. It is just a combination of price and product segmentation where those with more means help subsidize the price of R&D for everyone else. I was glad there were great $150 video cards when I was younger, and I'm glad there are amazing $700 video cards now that this isn't a large amount of money for my hobbies.

Re:$700 GTFO

[halofan_sd]

$700 is really not much money for some people, you don't need to be rich to have $700 to spend on a hobby. and of course there are cheaper alternatives that are ... cheaper

Re:$700 GTFO

[kronix1986]

Raw compute is only part of the story. Consoles are a fixed platform with much closer access to the hardware for devs than traditional high-level APIs.

There was a 2-3 period when PS3 games looked better than most PC games, for example, despite being far less powerful than the average gaming PC on paper.

Re:$700 GTFO

[enjar]

1) People using these for machine learning or other GPGPU work. Sure, it may not have the performance with double precision but if you are doing work with single precision math, these things are amazing at under $1K/pop rather than spending $4-5K for a Tesla card. There are even server chassis that can take 8 or 16 of these for this kind of work -- ridiculous amounts of compute power in a single enclosure, flirting with $20K all told depending on how you configure the underlying server.

2) A decent laptop is going to run you probably $1500, give or take. A really good laptop is going to flirt with $3K. I'd even venture to say that a $1500 laptop is the Honda Accord of the laptop world -- a nice machine, but not something you don't see every day. You could include one of these cards in a $1500 desktop build. Why would that be considered so odd?

3) People use computers for video editing, photo editing, etc. You can't do those things on the console.

4) I do most of my game play on a console, I like the simplicity. But if someone wants to be PC Master Race as their hobby, it's not all that weird. It's what they like.

Re:$700 GTFO

[UnknownSoldier]

> I thought that industry primarily used the Quadro line

It really depends on your needs.

For game developers, the artists are probably using Quadro's and programmers the non-Quadro's (GTX) to better match the _actual_ specs of the gamers. i.e. You can probably count on one hand the number of gamers with a Quadro card.

Prices due to VRAM options are all over the place for the Quadro line. Notice how nVidia doesn't list prices on the Quadro line.

If you're doing Modelling / CAD such as Maya / Max / SolidWorks / etc. then yeah, you're probably using a Quadro since the Quadro's prices are a drop in the (price) bucket -- relatively speaking. i.e. The M6000 with 24 GB of VRAM is selling on Amazon for $4,529.00 -- which is *already* discounted !

If not then Quadro's are hideously expensesive (significantly north of $1K) for the "rest of us". i.e. The Quadro P6000 has (had?) a MSRP of $7,000. The average gamer doesn't really "need" more then 6 GB VRAM.

It is kind of like F1 cars. They cost a fortune due to limited supply and demand but technology "trickles" down so us "mere mortals" can afford it. A rule-of-thumb for /oblg. PC Master Race is

* get the fastest single card you can afford
* re-sell it every 2~3 years to re-coop costs
* Don't spend more then $1,000 unless you actually _need_ it.

Performance has always been on a exponential curve. Every time you double (*) the cost your performance gains go down by 1/2 (*).

(*) SWAG. These are NOT actually numbers -- I pulled them out of my ass -- I just used them for illustrative purposes.

--
Microshat, noun, fucking you over with their crap since Winblows 95 by trying to lock you into proprietary technology that is dead within the decade. i.e. How is that Silverlight and XNA working out guys?

Re:$700 GTFO

[basecastula]

"majority of medical marijuana is high CBD / low THC. " Not in the SF bay area.

Re:$700 GTFO

[LeftCoastThinker]

To be clear, the console life cycle is somewhere around 7 years.

"there is almost always something at a much better price/performance ratio available. Compared with consoles, high end PCs are a completely different and superior gaming platform if you can afford one. "

This is my point exactly. I have been a gamer since ~1981. I have virtually every console ever made as well as having gamed on the PC since the IBM clone 386 days and the original space war... Gaming on the PC is just different, not always better. I have spent more hours than I can count dealing with driver quirkiness or other incompatibilities trying to game on the PC. Console games "just work". These days I don't have the time to dick around trying to get a PC game to work, so I find I do most gaming on a console, even though I have hundreds of games on Steam. Empirically, the PC may have much higher specs, but qualitatively I don't notice any difference on cross platform games. The frame rate may be higher, but once you hit 60FPS, there is not really a perceptible difference. The textures might be a bit more detailed etc, but nothing that makes a difference to playing the game. My Geforce 1050 Ti SSC 4GB looks great on every game I play and it was under $150.

Real gamers don't buy into the PCMR BS any more than being a Nintendo or Sony fanboy. Real gamers play on every platform and don't shill for any one platform (yes, PC is a platform by definition) and they evaluate how the games look and plays across platforms, not the specs of the platform. PC has always had better specs, but a lot of those specs get gobbled up by all the overhead that a PC has to carry and inefficiencies that game developers have to build in to PC games to accommodate the myriad of PC configurations out there.

Re:$700 GTFO

[The Real Dr John]

I've built gaming computers since the early 1990s, including doing so for a living for several years (www.kickassgear.com), and I never have any problems with getting games to work on PCs now. That was an issue back when NVidia cards were brand new on the market (maybe 1997?), but now all games work without any issues. At least they do for me. Drivers are never an issue now, especially if you have GeForce Experience installed (I don't). It makes the whole process idiot proof.

I've never owned a console because I have more than enough PCs here to accommodate any friends who are over for some gaming. The controllers on consoles are horrible and I don't know how anyone can stand them. In any case, I understand that many people don't want to spend that much money on a gaming machine, but all of my computers do double duty for work too. One of them is a dedicated imaging system for taking photomicrographs. So they get lots of real use as computers besides also being good for gaming.

Re:$700 GTFO

[Gallomimia]

You seem to have lost sight of what they're really building when they get cards like this. And you seem to have some strange sense of price ridicule at only putting one card in. Enthusiasts are putting in 4. Just to say they can.

Re:$700 GTFO

[LeftCoastThinker]

LOL no. I am a hardcore gamer. I have virtually every console since the Atari 2600 (mostly my original consoles, not off Ebay). I have been playing PC games since SpaceWar! (Google it). I currently game on PS4, Xbone and PC. My sub $150 Geforce 1050 Ti SSC 4GB looks great on every game I run on the PC. In terms of graphics and experience, it seems like $700 might net me 120 FPS instead of 60-90 FPS (which I don't really appreciate, try a double blind with some friends sometime and see if you can tell which is which) or 4K; unless you are gaming on a 40" or bigger screen at less than 2' view distance (which is damn uncomfortable in my book) you can't even see the difference between 1080 and 4k. 90% of these cards will probably be sold for gaming, and it just doesn't make sense. I am not mocking the hobby, just spending $700 instead of $200

I can see this board used for other uses like game devs, scene rendering, 3d modeling for video; 3D modeling for architecture/engineering is going to be using Quadro boards, which are more $ ($4k) but a lot more RAM(24GB).

Re:$700 GTFO

[Shirley Marquez]

Games are no longer the only reason to buy a high end video card. Rendering video is another popular use; all the major non-linear video editing programs support GPU-assisted rendering now and DaVinci Resolve requires the presence of at least a mid-range GPU to work at all. 3D content creation (programs like Maya and Blender) is another. And GPUs are used in a lot of scientific computing.

Re:$700 GTFO

[Sycraft-fu]

I know that feel on 60fps. I've tried to explain to some people that 60fps average isn't a metric I find useful. I want 60fps MINIMUM. I want a setup powerful enough I can vsync the game and never have it drop or stutter. That requires more horsepower. You can have something running at an average of 70fps, but if it dips to 40 frequently, it'll stutter

This card is basically their former 1199$ card

[Kartu]

This card is basically their former 1199$ card with minor differences.

Chip size is the same (471mm^2)
Shader cound is the same.
Memory bus is a bit smaller, so you end up with weirdo 11Gb vs 12Gb on original card.
Memory speed is a bit faster.

Claimed performance essentially is "faster than Titan".

It is both faster than expected and cheaper than expected (it costs as older and significantly slower 314mm^2 1080 at launch)

My bet they are trying to steal AMD Vega thunder (expected in Q2, possibly in May), which also is about 500mm^2 monster chip with superior memory (HBM2).

Re:This card is basically their former 1199$ card

[RogueyWon]

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.

Re:This card is basically their former 1199$ card

[visualight]

The smart money is waiting for Vega.

Re:This card is basically their former 1199$ card

[Yunzil]

Yeah, because AMD has such a great track record lately. The smart money is waiting for real-world benchmarks. And then probably buying an Nvidia card.

Blender

[maynard]

And what percent of GTX 1080 users need their Blender to render faster?

Yeah. So, having more cores helps speed the render. The latest Blender does support Pascal. It's very fast. But your real limiting factor here is how much of the scene can you fit into the card's memory? Because if you exceed total memory capacity of the card, you'll be rendering on your system CPU.

A Titan X Pascal ships with 12GB RAM and a few more rendering cores. Compared to GTX 1080TI at 11GB, it's a marginal difference for a whopping $600 savings. So, if you're rendering 3D photorealistic in Cycles, your question is, will that 1GB difference really matter? Because if not, you'll want to buy a second GTX1080 for a bit more than one Titan X Pascal, and you'll blow a single card away in rendering times. Or buy four of them for less than 2.5x the price of two Titan Xs.

For 2D cartoons, you'll see some benefit in Blender using planes and onion skinning. But not with OpenToonz, which really doesn't have extensive GL acceleration yet. So choose hardware carefully to the projects you expect will pay the bills.

Who in their right mind does this? Pro animators, it's not just film but also advertising and motion design for web. Or architects, who often shoot proposed sites with a drone and then use a 3D model with motion tracking to composite them together for clients.

So, when you're paid by the project, each extra hour of rendertime really matters. And easily justifies a few extra thousand dollars in hardware.

Re:Blender

[the_Bionic_lemming]

Owner of a 500 card here - poseiden 980 TI.

Question, if you could afford a ferrari, bugatti veyron, or perhaps a rolls royce - would you buy one?

Or would you turn those down and go for a base model golf? Or get a bicycle, because all you need is forward momentum, having an engine is just wasteful.

Re:Blender

[maynard]

It's all about justifying the hardware based on income potential.

Re:Blender

[LeftCoastThinker]

I would buy a Mustang at $25K, or maybe a 911 that is a few years old and have fun driving it and save the rest because pissing money away will eventually leave you with none (just ask most multi-million dollar lottery winners http://fortune.com/2016/01/15/... and a slew of celebrities http://www.foxnews.com/enterta... ). People who buy $100k plus cars very likely have tiny dicks and got their money by being lucky, not good. That or they have so much money they don't know what to do with it.

Nice

[Oxygen99]

This is one of the small number of graphics cards I would willingly insert into my motherboard. It is also among the much smaller group of graphics cards I would masturbate over.

Re:Nice

[Szeraax]

Oh that I had my points today...

This comment is my thoughts exactly.

Oh, man, I am HARD!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

This turns me on like nothing else can except Cmdr Taco.

How does it stack up against RX Vega?

[edxwelch]

I'm just wondering how will it stack up against RX Vega, which will be released next quarter?
Rumours have it Vega is 12 TFLOPs, while 1080 Ti is only 11 TFLOPs

Re:How does it stack up against RX Vega?

[ooloorie]

I would guess that a 10% increase in performance in 3 months is probably actually a little behind the curve.

Stand Alone Box

[Neuronwelder]

All this makes me wonder if they will ever build a separate video box coupled with light connectors. You would certainly have room to spare building components. Shedding heat would be a breeze. And close to no time lag with the light connection. A separate power supply too! - Just a thought.