Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti - release date, specs, pricing and rumours
Update November 14, 2016: Some detective work has uncovered a database entry in a shipping manifest which looks to confirm the existence of a 10GB GTX 1080 Ti. Sure, we knew it must be on its way, but this is the first real evidence of the card actually being near release.
Don’t wait until next year to upgrade, there are some great GPUs around right now. Check out our guide to the best graphics cards.
Gotta love those shipping manifests, right? Otherwise we'd just be rumour-mongering about a prospective new card with only speculation and pure hope powering it. Now we know a new card with the GP102 GPU actually exists, and that's surely got to be the GTX 1080 Ti Jen-Hsun will be unveiling at CES in January.
And we know a little more than just that too, because the database entry lists it as a 10GB part, showing 10,240MB of GDDR memory. Presumably that's GDDR5, so it's now looking even more like likely not to be sporting the GDDR5X memory used in the Pascal-based Titan X.
It still lists the card with a 384-bit aggregated memory bus, so losing 2GB compared with the Titan X's 12GB capacity shouldn't be too much of an issue. Even without the 'X' on the end of its memory spec it should still have a good chunk of video memory bandwidth available.
Original story November 8, 2016: The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is going to be the final piece of Nvidia's Pascal puzzle, the last graphics card of this generation before the green team unveils their new Volta architecture. And we’re pretty confident it’s going to be a welcome new year present for PC gamers.
Nvidia’s policy of not commenting on unreleased products means we’ve no official guarantee there’s actually going to be a GTX 1080 Ti, but I’d be more surprised for it not to appear than for Nvidia to release a line of green-tinged male grooming products. They’ve released a ‘Ti’ version of their top consumer card, based on a variant of that generation’s Titan GPU, for their last two graphics architectures.
Because the GTX 1080 Ti is likely to sit between the GTX 1080 and the Pascal-powered GTX Titan X we also have a pretty good idea of what sort of card it’s going to be. Hint: frickin’ fast.
Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti release date
“Happy New Year! Here’s the brand new GTX 1080 Ti.” That’s going to be Jen-Hsun’s opening gambit when he takes centre stage in Las Vegas at CES, the world’s leading tech show. Definitely. Probably. Maybe.
The Consumer Technology Association have revealed Nvidia CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, will be delivering the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) inaugural keynote address on January 4, 2017, and when the green team’s head honcho takes the stage it’s normally to show off something big and something new.
Nvidia released a short video showing the topics he’ll be covering in his keynote: deep learning, artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, virtual reality and gaming. Essentially everything Nvidia has in their techie arsenal. The first three topics are the typical areas you’d expect Nvidia to cover at CES - as the name suggests it’s a show more interested in consumer products rather than hardcore PC components.
Virtual reality though is still a hot topic which grabs the world's imagination and for that to work you need great consumer graphics cards and that’s where the GTX 1080 Ti must surely come in. With the GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1050 having recently launched the GTX 1080 Ti will be the final Pascal-based graphics card to round out Nvidia's full range.
And if the rumours of the next-generation of Nvidia GPU, code-named Volta, being unveiled at next year’s Nvidia Graphics Technology Conference (GTC) are true then the launch window for the GTX 1080 Ti is getting a little tight. With the AMD-shaped competition likely to have both the new Zen processors and early Vega graphics chips on show at the Las Vegas event in January, it would make sense for Nvidia to get their top-end consumer part launched to really spoil the red team’s reveals.
So yeah, we’re betting on a January reveal for the GTX 1080 Ti.
Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti price
The bad news is the GTX 1080 Ti is not going to be a particularly affordable graphics card for most of us. It’s going to sit somewhere in between the GTX 1080 and Titan X both in terms of performance and in pricing, and that means a price tag of somewhere between $630 (£565) and $1,200 (£1,099). With our guess leaning more towards the higher end of that scale.
If the Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti ends up costing less than $800 (£800) I would be very surprised indeed...especially if Nvidia persists with their Founders Edition malarkey.
That will make it the most expensive single-GPU consumer graphics card Nvidia have ever produced. Which shouldn’t be that surprising given the hefty rise in generation-on-generation pricing which has accompanied the current Pascal range of cards.
Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti specs
If it follows Nvidia passim the GTX 1080 Ti will be based on the exact same GP102 processor that’s currently powering the GTX Titan X graphical powerhouse. And that’s going to make it one hell of a gaming card.
Even with a modestly cut-down version of the GTX Titan X’s GP102 silicon, the GTX 1080 Ti will be a mighty 4K gamer. The rumours have the GTX 1080 Ti’s chip losing 256 CUDA cores, which translates to four streaming microprocessors (SMs), giving it a core count of 3,328. That’s still a hefty advantage over the 2,560 of the still seriously powerful GTX 1080.
The GTX 1080 Ti is likely to be clocked higher than the latest Titan X, which could end up making the performance delta between them closer than you might otherwise expect. And with the Titan X capable of nailing 60fps in most games at 4K, I’m betting Nvidia will be targeting that for their GTX 1080 Ti too.
There are some interesting rumours surrounding the memory configuration of the potential GTX 1080 Ti though. A leaked specs sheet has the GTX 1080 Ti using straight GDDR5 in its frame buffer, as opposed to the GDDR5X that both the GTX 1080 and Titan X are using. That would seem an odd choice, using a configuration with lower memory bandwidth than the next chip down the stack.
Still, whether there’s an ‘X’ tacked on to the end of its GDDR5 memory subsystem or not, the GTX 1080 Ti will probably be sporting the same 12GB capacity as the Titan X. Using 10GB, to sit between the GTX 1080 and Titan X, would probably be quite awkward to engineer into the card, so my guess would be they’ll stick at 12GB on the same 384-bit aggregated memory bus.
If Nvidia are simply using the same GP102 processor they've jammed into the GTX Titan X then we'll be looking at the 16nm FinFET design they've used from manufacturer's TSMC. But with the release of the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti cards, however, Nvidia have debuted a new 14nm FinFET process made by Samsung. The differences between the two processes are likely to be more about marketing numbers than genuine manufacturing variations, so if we had to bet we'd suggest the GTX 1080 Ti will stick to the same 16nm design as the GTX Titan X.
Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti performance
As I mentioned earlier, the GTX 1080 Ti is likely to only be a little off the pace compared with the Pascal-powered GTX Titan X. With a focus on ensuring the card is capable of dealing with modern DX12 game engines running at 4K, I’m expecting great things performance-wise from the GTX 1080 Ti.
With (potentially) the same memory configuration and TDP as the GTX Titan X I’d be very surprised if the GTX 1080 Ti’s missing 256 CUDA cores actually make that much of a difference to the gaming performance of the card. And given it’s reported to be running its GP102 GPU at a higher clockspeed than the GTX Titan X - 1,623MHz vs. 1,531MHz - the architectural difference is going to be minimised due to Nvidia brute forcing the frequency instead.
Of course Jen-Hsun may just spend his CES keynote time talking about how computer-driven cars aren’t going to mow down cats thanks to Nvidia or launching another hand-held Shield, but that would be a wasted opportunity...
