The Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti is the present quickest GeForce GPU, and your greatest hope for real gaming efficiency as a 4K graphics card. It’s over a 12 months outdated now, nevertheless it’s nonetheless the king. Of course there’s at all times the extremely costly Titan playing cards, however they value silly cash. Well, they’re all stupidly costly now that the cryptocurrency market has damaged our tech-buying hearts… however at the very least graphics card costs are beginning to calm down somewhat on the Nvidia aspect.
The GTX 1080 Ti is the ultimate piece of the puzzle close to the Pascal era of GeForce GPUs, and matches within the sizable hole between the GTX 1080 and the Titan Xp.
Make positive you’ve received the best SSD to get you into the sport rapidly to indicate off the ability of your graphics card.
It’s additionally going to stay the quickest GeForce card available on the market till Nvidia will get round to translating the presently compute-based Nvidia Volta structure right down to the desktop stage later this 12 months. Exactly after we’re nonetheless undecided.
It appears to be like like the brand new mainstream gaming GPUs might be at the very least unveiled by August 20 this 12 months, as Hot Chips has annouced a break down of the brand new silicon at its occasion simply earlier than Gamescom. It hasn’t said the identify or the structure but, so they might nonetheless be known as both GTX 2080 or GTX 1180, operating on the Nvidia Volta tech.
Or possibly the brand new playing cards will come rocking the Nvidia Turing structure, or possibly Nvidia Ampere… Right now there may be extra hypothesis over the naming of the next-gen GeForce playing cards than there may be any laborious reality.
Or gentle reality. Right now, I’d take gentle reality.
The highly effective, environment friendly Pascal structure has had a great run although, and the GTX 1080 Ti is completely one of the best of the gaming lot.
Click on the fast hyperlinks beneath to get to the juicy bits.
Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti performance
Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti specs
As probably the ultimate grand hurrah of the Pascal structure (we’re refusing to rely the weird GTX 1070 Ti) the GTX 1080 Ti is a really acquainted card, made much more so by its hanging resemblance to the Titan X. We had initially anticipated Nvidia to comply with its earlier Titan>Ti kind by chopping a number of chunks of logic out of the massive chip to squeeze it down right into a extra price-friendly, consumer-focused kind. Not a little bit of it…
Nvidia has just about simply rebadged the Titan X and almost halved its value. To that finish the GTX 1080 Ti is rocking the identical 16nm FinFET GP102 GPU with 12 billion transistors and the identical 3,584 CUDA cores inside it.
Those cores are arrayed throughout 28 streaming microprocessors (SMs) in six graphics processing clusters. The full core configuration, although, is ever so barely totally different from the Titan X. Despite having the identical 3,584 cores and 224 texture items, Nvidia has lower the variety of render output items (ROPs) to 88, down from 96. It’s additionally made a slight incision into the cache and eliminated a small quantity of that too – the L2 cache on the Titan X stands at 3,072Ok, whereas the GTX 1080 Ti has 2,816Ok of L2.
Things are most totally different on the reminiscence aspect, although the essential spec change isn’t truly the drop from 12GB to 11GB of GDDR5X. Working with reminiscence maestro, Micron, Nvidia has dropped the quickest high-capacity graphics reminiscence round onto the GTX 1080 Ti’s PCB. This new iteration of GDDR5X reminiscence has an ordinary working frequency of 5,505MHz and an 11Gbps information price. That means regardless of truly having much less reminiscence, and thus a smaller aggregated reminiscence bus (352-bit as a substitute of the Titan X’s 384-bit), the GTX 1080 Ti comes with a complete reminiscence bandwidth of 484GB/s. That could solely be 4GB/s sooner than the Titan X, however that’s nonetheless spectacular.
Nvidia has additionally boosted the cooling and energy componentry surrounding the beefy GP102 GPU that varieties the beating coronary heart of the GTX 1080 Ti. The new seven-phase dual-FET design spreads the ability load greater than the Titan X and permits for much less energy leakage (realised in GPU phrases as warmth) and a cleaner provide of juice. This is partly how Nvidia has been in a position to ship the usual GTX 1080 Ti playing cards with the next out-of-the-box enhance clock than the Titan X.
The Founders Edition cooler contains a new vapour chamber and an total design which Nvidia claims provides twice the airflow space the GTX 1080’s Founders Edition has. The additional exhaust space wanted to spice up the airflow does imply there’s no DVI connection on the cardboard’s I/O plate, although.
Nvidia does provide a DisplayPort to DVI adapter nonetheless, for many who can’t surrender their old-school screens. I’ve nonetheless received a beautiful 30-inch IPS Dell display that wants a DVI connection so I can completely sympathise…
Interestingly, although, regardless of the additional energy and cooling engineering efforts, the thermal threshold of the chip has truly been lowered from its Titan X days. The Titan X will solely begin throttling its chip when the silicon tops 94°C, whereas the GTX 1080 Ti will begin reining in its GPU at 91°C.
Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti benchmarks
Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti efficiency
So there it’s, in orange and blue: the GTX 1080 Ti is quicker in-game than Pascal’s Titan X. It’s solely ever by a few frames per second on common at most, however the reality there’s a efficiency delta leaning in direction of the newer, cheaper card in any respect is deeply spectacular.
It must go with out saying, then, meaning it additionally provides the GTX 1080 a strong shoeing within the gaming efficiency stakes too. Nvidia has been calling this one of the best Ti card it is ever produced for the very fact it estimates a 35% efficiency enhance over the GTX 1080 with the brand new GTX 1080 Ti, however in our testing that’s wanting like a somewhat conservative assertion.
At instances, particularly at 4K, we’ve been seeing efficiency effectively over 50% increased utilizing the GTX 1080 Ti. The value distinction between the 2 playing cards then does genuinely provide a critical body price improve for the cash, giving a transparent delineation between Nvidia’s prime two consumer-focused GPUs. If you’re sticking with a 1440p monitor the GTX 1080 will see you proper, but when your focus is mounted firmly on 4K screens – or above – then the GTX 1080 Ti is the one card it’s worthwhile to take into account proper now.
While there isn’t a lot of a distinction within the gaming efficiency of the GTX 1080 Ti and the Titan X, there does appear to be within the total energy draw. We measured the utmost platform energy draw from the wall throughout intensive 3D testing and the GTX 1080 Ti appeared a great bit extra thirsty than the Titan X. Given the upper GPU clockspeeds and the elevated reminiscence frequency although that’s in all probability not stunning. When you’ve received a chip as large and sophisticated because the GP102 GPU the ability draw will increase dramatically as you push it tougher and tougher.
That’s evident in our overclocking testing too. At our peak GPU and reminiscence frequencies each the GTX 1080 Ti and Titan X push effectively over the 400W peak. Sadly, although, I used to be unable to get both GP102 chips above the 2GHz overclocking mark Jen-Hsun Huang had been exhibiting off on stage on the GDC unveiling of the GTX 1080 Ti.
Still, hitting a GPU offset of +150MHz and +190MHz for the Ti and Titan X respectively isn’t unhealthy and meant each playing cards have been typically (due to frequency/energy variance) operating at round 1,911MHz in-game.
On the reminiscence aspect, the GTX 1080 Ti’s newly-minted Micron GDDR5X reminiscence is able to being pushed loads additional than that of the Titan X. I used to be nonetheless in a position to coax the older card’s reminiscence up above the 11Gbps mark, however on the Ti I virtually hit 12Gbps. Despite that, with each playing cards operating at their most overclock, the Titan X truly maintained the very slightest efficiency lead over the GTX 1080 Ti.
This is the place the GTX 1080 Ti’s new cooler comes into play, although. The Titan X will get extremely blowy when you begin cranking up the clocks, whereas the GTX 1080 Ti is noticeably quieter. It’s positively not truly quiet although, once you get above 50% fan pace you’ll actually learn about it. We’ll be trying to the board companions and their bespoke cooling arrays to vary that.
Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti verdict
For all of the little particulars of this evaluation, the cache, GPU, and reminiscence variations, all it’s worthwhile to know is Nvidia has created a graphics card with all the ability of its flagship Titan X for nearly half the value. So yeah, for all of your 4K wants look no additional. Shouldn’t have actually bothered writing all that different stuff, ought to I? This might’ve simply been a 140 character Twitter evaluation…
There remains to be the truth that, whereas compared with the $1,200 Titan X the GTX 1080 Ti appears to be like like a cut price, we’re nonetheless speaking a couple of consumer-focused graphics card that prices $870 (£669). That’s an enormous amount of cash, and simply because the professional-level Titan X has been priced at that time it doesn’t imply we ought to just accept that high-end graphics playing cards aimed on the client market ought to value one of the best a part of a grand.
Kudos to Nvidia although for lastly giving up on the Pascal era’s reference card/Founders Edition pricing shenanigans. But we’re nonetheless going to see some critically costly GTX 1080 Ti playing cards within the coming months.
The straight GTX 1080’s value drop, nonetheless, makes that a much more tempting GPU for anybody not but trying to make the transfer to 4K. At 1440p and 1080p the GTX 1080 is greater than sufficient GPU for even essentially the most discerning of avid gamers. Even at 4K it manages some fairly wholesome body charges, particularly in the event you’re good along with your graphics and post-processing settings.
But what of the Titan X? The GTX 1080 Ti is sort of a large silicon middle-finger to anybody who dropped the money on a Titan X, but in addition leaves the all of a sudden irrelevant card lifeless within the water. There’s merely no level, no profit, to selecting the Titan X over the Ti. And that’s a primary; the Ti playing cards have at all times been mighty near their Titan compatriots, however have typically maintained a slight lead, even when simply of their prolonged body buffer.
Which is why Nvidia subsequently launched the Titan Xp a short time after the GTX 1080 Ti launch fuss had died down. As predicted, it makes use of the complete GP102 core Nvidia fitted out their prime Quadro playing cards with.
For most of us, the GTX 1080 Ti stays one of the best high-end 4K graphics card round. It’s nonetheless priced past the attain of regular avid gamers, but when your pockets is fats and also you’re aiming for the best resolutions in gaming then that is the GPU for you. Hell, you may decide up two of them for less than barely greater than you may spend on a model new Titan Xp.
Nothing else save a $1,200 Titan X can come near the unbelievable efficiency of the GTX 1080 Ti. It’s nonetheless an offensively costly graphics card, nevertheless it’s completely your greatest guess for critical 4K gaming efficiency.
SE7EN.WS verdict: 9/10
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