NVIDIA made a surprise reveal this weekend at the DreamHack gaming event in Austin, Texas, when CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showcased the company’s first Pascal-based graphics processing unit: the GTX 1080.
The card, which ranks higher in performance and power efficiency than NVIDIA’s current Titan X, features nine teraFLOPS (floating-point operations per second) of computing power as well as 8GB of GDDR5X memory.
A chart highlighting the VR gaming performance of popular high-end NVIDIA graphics cards, with the GTX 1080 outperforming in both performance and power saving capabilities
Huang said during the event:
“Several thousand people have been working on this project now, for more than two years. This is the largest GPU endeavor, the largest chip project endeavor, the largest processor endeavor in the history of humanity. The RnD budget was several billion dollars.”
The new card drew warm reception from both the audience at the event and online, with one person online expressing remorse for those who had purchased a Titan X instead of waiting for the GTX 1080. The card not only has better performance and efficiency than the Titan X, but also costs less than the Titan X by $400 USD.
The GTX 1080 is set to hit store shelves on May 27.
NVIDIA also made mention of the GTX 1070, which is cheaper but is still more powerful than the Titan X. The GTX 1070 will run $379 and rocks 6.5 teraFLOPS and has 8GB of GDDR5 RAM. Those cards will start hitting shelves on June 10.
