NVIDIA's AIC Partners to Launch GTX 1080, 1060 With Faster GDDR5, GDDR5X Memory

[Raevenlord]

At their GDC event yesterday, NVIDIA announced a change to how partners are able to outfit their GTX 1080 and GTX 1060 6 GB models in regards to video memory. Due to improvements in process and scaled-down costs, NVIDIA has decided to allow partners to purchase 11 Gbps GDDR5X (up from 10 Gbps) and 9Gbps (up from 8 Gbps) GDDR5 memory from them, to pair with the GTX 1080 and GTX 1060 6 GB, respectively. These are to be sold by NVIDIA's AIB partners as overclocked cards, and don't represent a change to the official specifications on either graphics card. With this move, NVIDIA aims to give partners more flexibility in choosing memory speeds and carving different models of the same graphics card, with varying degrees of overclock, something which was particularly hard to do on conventional 10 Gbps-equipped GTX 1080's, which showed atypically low memory overclocking headroom.



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[medi01]

Notable that 1070 doesn't get it.

 

[ne6togadno]

NVIDIA's AIB Partners to Launch GTX 1080, 1060 With Faster GDDR5, GDDR5X Memory

this doesnt sound well.

 

[P4-630]

Ones these are out with the faster vrams......Oh wished I had bought a GTX1060 6GB instead of my RX480 some people will say......

 

[microsista]

Ones these are out with the faster vrams......Oh wished I had bought a GTX1060 instead of my RX480 some people will say......

1060 has less memory and is more expensive, it does need the extra speed to compete

 

[P4-630]

1060 has less memory and is more expensive, it does need the extra speed to compete

I think 8GB vram on a RX480 is overkill for gaming since it's an 1080p card.

 

[medi01]

Oh wished I had bought a GTX1060 instead of my RX480 some people will say.

Why would they?

It's particularly ironic having 1060 3Gb, which actually isn't really 1060.

 

[microsista]

I think 8GB vram on a RX480 is overkill for gaming since it's an 1080p card.

for now, yeah since there isn't that many games that can use over 6gb at 1080p, but in a year or so there will be, and the 1060 will struggle

 

[P4-630]

for now, yeah since there isn't that many games that can use over 6gb at 1080p, but in a year or so there will be, and the 1060 will struggle

I don't think a RX480 8GB vram has enough horsepower for utilizing the full 8GB vram with ingame eye-candy settings @1080p, maybe at 20fps then...

The GTX1060 6GB is a well balanced card with it's not-to less not-to-much 6GB usable vram vs horsepower.

 

[microsista]

I don't think a RX480 8GB vram has enough horsepower for utilizing the full 8GB vram with ingame eye-candy settings @1080p, maybe at 20fps then...

The GTX1060 is a well balanced card with it's not-to less not-to-much 6GB usable vram vs horsepower.

games are becoming much more vram intensive without being that much more demanding, also vram mainly affects texture quality, and having higher texture quality doesnt affect fps at all

 

[P4-630]

games are becoming much more vram intensive without being that much more demanding, also vram mainly affects texture quality, and having higher texture quality doesnt affect fps at all

I don't think there will be a game anytime soon that will fill up all 8GB vram with high quality textures @1080p.

Before that happens we are years further and RX480 will be obsolete.

 

[xkche]

My RX480 with "just" 4GB handle @4K BF1 (~30-40fps), BF4 (~50-70fps), DOOM (~40-60fps).

I see this like a "I'm here" from NVIDIA.

 

[newtekie1]

I don't think there will be a game anytime soon that will fill up all 8GB vram with high quality textures @1080p.

Before that happens we are years further and RX480 will be obsolete.

RE7 on very high uses about 7.5GB@1080p. But that's largely attributed to the shadow cache. Turning that off just about halves the memory usage.

 

[microsista]

there are alredy games that use around 6gb, and some use even more than that, its not that hard to imagine that in a year or so we will be getting games that require close to 8gb, especially because xbox scorpio has 12gb of memory so developers will have to take advantage of that creating high-res textures for games

 

[P4-630]

RE7 on very high uses about 7.5GB@1080p. But that's largely attributed to the shader cache. Turning that off just about halves the memory usage.

And how well does this run with these settings on a RX480?

 

[coolernoob]

about RX 480 8GB being useless overkill - not because games and future games can not utilize more than 4GB, but because games that do (or will) so - laggs (sub 20fps) on RX 480 anyway (in setting that require more than 4GB) - so 4GB+ for GPUs like that is and will be unusable overkill now and even more so in the future

 

[Solidstate89]

this doesnt sound well.

Why?

 

[newtekie1]

And how well does this run with these settings on a RX480?

Just fine on the 8GB model, stutters like hell on the 4GB model.

 

[londiste]

about RX 480 8GB being useless overkill - not because games and future games can not utilize more than 4GB, but because games that do (or will) so - laggs (sub 20fps) on RX 480 anyway (in setting that require more than 4GB) - so 4GB+ for GPUs like that is and will be unusable overkill now and even more so in the future

incorrect. the setting that has been having by far the largest effect on vram usage lately is texture quality that has otherwise very small impact on performance.

 

[P4-630]

Just fine on the 8GB model, stutters like hell on the 4GB model.

can it hold 60fps @1080p with these settings?

 

[ZoneDymo]

I don't think there will be a game anytime soon that will fill up all 8GB vram with high quality textures @1080p.

Before that happens we are years further and RX480 will be obsolete.

idk man, especially in the last few years Vram usage has shot up dramatically, partially because the consoles now have quite a bit of memory to spare as well.
And like mentioned, this is purely about texture quality/size, that has almost zero impact on the performance but does improve quality.
You just need the space to store them which the RX480 with 8gb provides.

 

[NdMk2o1o]

Just fine on the 8GB model, stutters like hell on the 4GB model.

You must of meant shadow cache cause my 4gb 290x played it at ultra with shadow caching off at solid 60fps @ 1080p

 

[newtekie1]

can it hold 60fps @1080p with these settings?

Yes and beyond. this graph is from 1080 very high settings. The lowest 0.1% were still over 69FPS on the 8GB. But look at that 4GB result. That is stutter due to memory limitation if I've ever seen it.

You must of meant shadow cache cause my 4gb 290x played it at ultra with shadow caching off at solid 60fps @ 1080p

Yes, sorry, shadow cache not shader cache.

I'm not really arguing that 8GB isn't overkill(IMO, it is). I'm just pointing out that games do use more than 4GB of VRAM now, and is isn't always the case that the settings have to be turned up so high that it overwhelms the power of the GPU.

At the same time, I'd say that games don't need to use more than 4GB to look good. The shadow cache option makes very little visual difference. And I'd be just as happy playing RE7 on a RX 480 4GB as on an 8GB. And most of the games that use more than 4GB of RAM, actually run just fine on 4GB cards as well without tweaking any settings. Look at Rise of the Tomb Raider as an example. Even at 1080 it will use over 6GB of RAM, just because it is cramming as many textures as possible into VRAM, even alot that aren't being used. But, unlike RE7, it actually runs just fine without stuttering on cards with only 4GB of RAM. Just because the game knows how much VRAM is there, and will only load up textures that are important and actually used first, then fill the rest of the unused VRAM with less important textures that might be used next. It is using the VRAM as basically a texture cache. Less VRAM just means a smaller left over amount of VRAM, and a smaller cache size.

 

[microsista]

4gb is low, good for mid-high settings, 6gb is ok for now, but not future-proof, 8gb is future-proof

 

[Assimilator]

I'm interested to hear the detail on this. Either the 9Gbps memory is Samsung (whose "8Gbps" GDDR5 has always been able to hit 9Gbps), or Micron has finally got their process to parity with what Samsung had at Pascal's launch. If the former, expect graphics card models to be tiered by their memory type (e.g. FTW with Micron and FTW+ with Samsung). If the latter, it may be that NVIDIA has decided to stop dual-sourcing memory and only use Micron as the supplier of both GDDR5 and GDDR5X, which would make sense for both companies.

Not seeing the GTX 1070 is both logical and confusing. Logical, because restricting it to 8Gbps makes it have a larger performance gap to GTX 1080 11Gbps and GTX 1060 9Gbps, which would balance NVIDIA's product stack a bit better. Confusing, because I'm sure a 9Gbps GTX 1070 would sell well.