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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.
"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.
> 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."