Nvidia GTX 1080, GTX 1070: More power and efficiency

After years of rumours and what seemed to be a never ending wait, the fabled 16nm fabrication process is here with NVIDIA’s latest lineup of graphics cards titled Pascal. At their pre Computex press conference, NVIDIA revealed their latest lineup of GPUs for gaming and left the world stunned. The GTX 1080 and the 1070 that will launch on 26 May and 10 June 2016 respectively promise the greatest iterative increment in performance we have seen from GPUs in a long while.

This can mainly be attributed to the new fabrication process that increases the per watt performance of these cards, and the use of the new GDDR5X memory module in the case of the 1080. Speaking at length about the 1080, NVIDIA claims that this card, priced at $600, outstrips their current flagship, the TITAN X considerably in certain VR applications while being three times as power efficient. The 1080 has a memory clock speed of 10Gbps, the highest we have seen on a GPU till date and was running at a whopping 2.4 Ghz on the conference floor.

The most astounding fact was that even at these insane clock speeds, the temperature on the stock, air-cooled 1080 was a mere 670C. This points towards a massive overclocking headroom, especially if fancy aftermarket liquid cooling solutions are applied. The 1080 also features eight GB of the new GDDR5X memory module, while the 1070, which is priced at $379 comes with eight GB of GDDR5 memory, which isn’t bad at all.

As is the case with any hardware launch, NVIDIA also showed off some of the new special software features that would come bundled with the Pascal cards, of which the most interesting was definitely Ansel. This new screen-capturing software allows users to take a snapshot of the scene in game and later, using the software, change the viewing angles.

This software however, will not be applicable to every game as NVIDIA also mentioned that this would be developer based, and therefore only be available in certain games like No Man’s Sky, The Witcher 3, to begin with. The release of Pascal marks the beginning of a new era in PC gaming hardware, one that promises to be filled with an astronomical improvement in performance and visual fidelity in games at higher resolutions than 1920x1080.