Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti - release date, specs, pricing and rumours

Nvidia have just announced the GTX 1080 Ti and it looks every inch the Titan X killer. 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 out-pace the Pascal-powered Titan X when it launches.

In a surprising move Nvidia have specced the new GTX 1080 Ti incredibly closely to the Titan X, previously the green team’s most powerful consumer GPU and it's also nearly half the price. The GPU itself is almost identical and because the memory and clockspeeds have both been set higher we’re expecting it to outpace the Titan X too.

Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti release date

On stage at the GeForce GTX Gaming Celebration event, just down the road from GDC in San Francisco, Nvidia CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, announced the new card along with it’s release date right at the start of March next week.

The GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition will be the first card to drop, but the partners will be shipping their own versions, with their own coolers, shortly after launch. Nvidia also aren’t restricting the Founders Edition to their own website, allowing their graphics card vendors to sell them too.

But if you're after a new GPU today check out our guide to the best graphics cards around right now.

Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti price

This is where things get kinda surprising. Because it’s specced so closely to the Titan X it’s certainly not a cheap card, but at just $699 (£699) it’s a hell of a lot less expensive than we were expecting. And with the slower Titan X still retailing on GeForce.com for $1,200 you could kinda call it a bargain. Kinda. I mean it's still pretty much $700 (£700) after all.

Nvidia have also taken a departure from their old Founders Edition shenanigans. The initial GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition card isn’t going to be demanding the extra price premium previous Founders Ed cards arrived with. These first cards with the Nvidia reference cooler are priced at the same MSRP the board partner cards will ship with when they follow soon after launch.

With the AMD RX Vega competition on the horizon soon it looks like Nvidia are looking to fire the first shots in what could shape up to be a real epic high-end GPU battle.

Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti specs

This is where it gets interesting and justifies that impressive pricing. The GTX 1080 Ti is almost just a rebranded Titan X. It’s using the same GP102 GPU with barely anything missing and only has one less gigabyte of video memory.

The GTX 1080 Ti has the same 3,584 CUDA core design, spread across 28 SMs. All that’s really missing from the Titan X’s core configuration are eight render output units - the 1080 Ti has 88 versus the Titan X’s 96. It’s also got the same number of texture units and the same 250W TDP. 

And even though it’s missing that single gigabyte of video memory Nvidia have dropped in Micron’s latest GDDR5X memory, with performance optimisations to allow it to run at a full 11Gbps, giving the GTX 1080 Ti a massive memory bandwidth of 484Gbps, which is ever so slightly faster than the Titan X.

In terms of the GPU clocks the GTX 1080 Ti is also setup to run faster than the GP102 in the Titan X. The base clock of the new card is 1,480MHz with a boost clock of 1,582MHz. Though because it’s a Pascal GPU it’s going to have some serious overclocking headroom too. Nvidia say that a 2GHz overclocked GPU isn’t going to be beyond the realms of possibility.

And that could also have something to do with the new power system that Nvidia have dropped into the GTX 1080 Ti. The new dualFET design allows for the card to run with more power, but also to run more efficiently than the old GTX 1080.

Nvidia have also updated the Founders Edition cooler too. The vapour chamber design now has twice the cooling area, which allows you to either run the card at the same temperature for a reduction in the dB levels, or conversely run it cooler with the same aural footprint as the GTX 1080’s reference cooler design.

Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti performance

We were originally expecting Nvidia to release the GTX 1080 Ti with a cut down version of the GP102 from the Titan X. That would have put it slightly behind the peak Pascal card in terms of raw performance. But with it utilising almost exactly the same core configuration and with a higher boost clock and faster memory, there’s every chance that it will leave the Titan X trailing in its gaming wake.

That missing one gigabyte of video memory is unlikely to make any difference at all, especially with the extra speed actually delivering more memory bandwidth than the Titan X.

It seems like a mighty overclocker too with it's new cooler and power design. On stage at the recent GeForce GTX Gaming Celebration we saw the new GTX 1080 Ti running at over 2GHz but with the Founders Edition cooler running at just 66°C. That's some impressively chilled gaming performance right there.

Which all means it’s also going to severely outperform the laggardly GTX 1080 too. Nvidia estimate that it ought to lead the GTX 1080 by around 35% which, they say, makes it the best ‘Ti’ card they’ve ever made.