NVIDIA announces its new GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

NVIDIA Editor's Day 2017 - NVIDIA hosted tech press and analysts from all over the globe today during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to brief us on all of their latest goodies - but the crown jewel was the new GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card.

Countless gamers have been waiting for NVIDIA to unleash the GTX 1080 Ti, and today is your day - NVIDIA have made it even more special, by making the new GTX 1080 Ti the best Ti card ever.

In previous iterations of the Ti cards in the GeForce GTX 780 Ti and GTX 980 Ti, we've seen improvements of 18-25% over the non-Ti cards. The GTX 780 Ti was 18% faster than the GTX 780, while the GTX 980 Ti was 25% faster than the stock GTX 980.

But with the GTX 1080 Ti, NVIDIA has out done themselves with a huge 35% improvement over the already fast GTX 1080. But how did they do this? Well, there's a few things - so let's dive right into the specifications of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

Specs:

12 billion transistors

1.6GHz Boost, 2GHz OC

28 SMs, 128 cores each

3584 CUDA cores

28 Geometry units

224 Texture units

6 GPCs

88 ROPs

352-bit GDDR5X

As you can see, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is a freakin' technological beast.

NVIDIA didn't just gimp the Titan X, or beef up the GTX 1080 - they made some massive changes in multiple areas of the card - with most of the improvements coming from the VRAM side of things.

The new GeForce GTX 1080 Ti rocks a strange 352-bit memory bus, with 11GB (yes, not 10GB or 12GB, but rather 11GB) of GDDR5X. NVIDIA worked closely with Micron on tweaking GDDR5X from what we've seen on the GTX 1080 and Titan X graphics cards, with 11Gbps of bandwidth - up from the 10Gbps offered on GTX 1080 and Titan X.

If we compare the Boost clocks of the Titan X (1531MHz) to the new GTX 1080 Ti (1600MHz) - we can see it is clocking faster than Titan X. Comparing it to the GTX 1080 and its Boost clock of 1733MHz, NVIDIA is clocking down the GTX 1080 Ti - but it has more CUDA cores.

The GTX 1080 has 2560 CUDA cores, while the Titan X has 3584 CUDA cores - the same number of CUDA cores found in the new GTX 1080 Ti.

The Number 11

There was a big story around the number 11, with NVIDIA bringing up Spinal Tap - perfectly. NVIDIA specifically chose 11 for a number of reasons:

NVIDIA also discussed new uses of compression and tiled caching that boosts memory bandwidth, significantly. In terms of raw bandwidth, the GTX 1080 Ti has 480GB/sec (the same bandwidth as the Titan X) while the use of compression boosts it to 900GB/sec or so, while tiled caching adds more - pushing it to an insane 1200GB/sec (or 1.2TB/sec).

The GTX 1080 Ti also has a new thermal design, with vapor chamber cooling and two cooling areas - backed by up by a 7-phase dualFET power delivery system, with 250A of power, and 14 dualFETs.

NVIDIA's use of 2 x dualFET allows the card to have better efficiency as the power of the card increases, with some big improvements over the GTX 980 - and even the newer GTX 1080.

Cooling performance is also improved over the GTX 1080, with the new GTX 1080 Ti being 2.5dB quieter, and 5C cooler than the GTX 1080 when using up to 220W of power.

What about gaming performance? This is what we're all here for today - and NVIDIA has delivered in a big, freaking, way. They compared the GTX 1080 Ti against the GTX 1080, offering 30-40% more performance - yes, you read that right - 30-40% faster than the GTX 1080 (which is already a damn fast card).

Now, pricing - this is where things are interesting - NVIDIA has priced the new GeForce GTX 1080 Ti at $699. Not too damn bad for how powerful it is!

Will you be buying one?