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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.
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.
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.
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.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
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.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
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.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
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.
Are we talking again about these poor people from Silicon Valley barely making a living on $160k/y???
"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.
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 $.
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.
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.
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 ...
Achille Talon
Hop!
No, those people don't have enough money and are stuck playing games with Intel's integrated GPU.
#DeleteFacebook
> 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.
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"One does not fully appreciate just how complicated reality is until one starts trying to simulate it."
Absolutely. Half goes to taxes and rent for a townhouse is like $4K/month. Better watch your expenses!
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.
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.
> 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.
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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?