HiGame

AUSTIN, TEXAS — It’s been nearly 18 months since Nvidia unveiled its last-generation Maxwell architecture, and the PC enthusiast community has been chomping at the bit to see what benefits 14/16nm technology would deliver. Both Nvidia and AMD are planning new launches for the 14nm node, but Nvidia is launching first with both a new GPU and new technologies wrapped around it — some of which have been backported to previous cards.

Meet the GTX 10xx

Nvidia isn’t revealing exact performance details yet, but the GTX 1080 and 1070 are billed as being far more power efficient and capable than the 28nm Maxwell GPUs that predated them. The GTX 1080 is built on Micron’s GDDR5X with a 256-bit memory bus with a 10Gbps transfer rate (GDDR5 tops out at roughly 7.0Gbps, though some 8.0Gbps memory did ship in 2015). Nvidia is promising significant performance improvements due to a combination of improved power efficiency, overclocking headroom, and architectural enhancements. The GTX 1080 packs 2560 cores, but its performance gains are significantly higher than that increase implies.



Most performance data is still under wraps, but there are two slides worth paying attention to. The first, shown above, is Nvidia’s own estimate for how much the 1080 will improve in general game performance over and above the GTX 9xx family. The GTX 1080 appears to be roughly 1.65 to 1.75x faster than the GTX 980, depending on how you eyeball the graph.




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