NVIDIA's new Pascal GP104 processor, which powers the GeForce GTX 1080, is a true marvel in silicon engineering. The new card is faster than any single GPU card we've seen to date, but also includes tons of new technologies and efficiency improvements.
When looking at the performance of this new powerhouse, we see it perform twice(!) as well as the GTX 970 when averaged over our test suite at 4K resolution. Compared to NVIDIA's GTX 980 Ti, the performance uplift is about 30%, and the GTX 1080 is not even the highest-end card NVIDIA will release on Pascal. Against AMD's R9 Fury X, the GTX 1080 is over 30% faster as well. GTX 970 SLI, which is an excellent value proposition, is also conclusively beat, and at lower pricing. This means that with one quick swoop, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 has obsoleted everything in the high-end market.

The GeForce GTX 1080 comes with a new thermal solution that gives the card a more edgy look. The cooler uses two slots, comes with a nice thin backplate that doesn't block SLI airflow significantly and can be partially removed to improve SLI airflow even more. However, its cooling performance seems largely unimproved over previous versions of the NVIDIA reference design. The cooler still runs above 80°C during serious gaming, which means gaming performance will be slightly reduced by Boost to keep temperatures in check. While idle fan noise is low, the card does not include the highly popular idle-fan off feature. Also, during gaming, noise levels are decent, but not nearly as quiet as what we've seen on some custom GTX 980 Ti designs with much higher heat output. Compared to the GTX 980 with the reference cooler, which emits roughly the same amount of heat as the GTX 1080, the GTX 1080 ends up noisier. I feel the cooler is the weakest part of the GTX 1080, which gives add-in board partners room to improve on this otherwise awesome card.

NVIDIA's new GPU is produced on a 16 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan, which means that just the process changes are enough to have power efficiency go up, but NVIDIA put in some extra work, and the result is the most efficient graphics card ever made. It draws only around 180 watts during heavy gaming, which, while similar to the GTX 980, also has the GTX 1080 deliver much higher performance at the same time. Looking at performance-per-watt, it's almost like magic; the GTX 1080 is nearly twice as efficient as Maxwell, which also means it's twice as efficient as AMD's Fiji cards.

With Boost 3.0, NVIDIA has updated the way overclocking works. Instead of dialing in a single fixed frequency increase that is applied to every frequency that Boost picks, you can now select an individual overclock per voltage - up to 80 such levels exist, which makes overclocking much more complex. Some efforts are happening at the GPU OC tool front, but the beta version of EVGA Precision still has a long ways to go before it's ready for mass consumption. I'm also having doubts about how much can be gained by these individual frequency adjustments, but that's, I guess, something for a future article. We did some OC testing, and there are significant gains to be had on both GPU and memory that result in over 10% more performance.

Price-wise, the GeForce GTX 1080 Founder's Edition (the card we reviewed today) clocks in at $699, which is a $100 increase over NVIDIA's MSRP of $599. That's a huge price premium that is not worth it in my opinion, not for a cooler that doesn't perform that great, and NVIDIA has confirmed that Founder's Edition cards won't come with higher-OC-potential GPUs. I suspect that this approach is NVIDIA's way to milk early adopters since there will only be the Founders Edition in the first few weeks, until board partners come out with their custom designs, which will appear well after Computex. I'm also worried that this could tempt board partners into picking $699 as the baseline for their custom-design products, and that we'll see very few if any cards at $599. All this is quite unknown at the moment, though, so let's wait a bit and see what happens. AMD's upcoming Polaris is no threat to the GeForce GTX 1080 because it addresses a completely different lower-performance segment. Despite the price, the GTX 1080 is an awesome card at a very competitive price point if you look at the price-to-performance ratio of previous generations, and its performance and efficiency are in a class of its own. The card is an excellent upgrade for everyone, though maybe not for GTX 980 Ti owners because you won't get much money if you sell yours now, and the performance uplift isn't big enough to warrant spending a few hundred bucks for a few percent over an overclocked custom-design version. This could, on the other hand, be a great chance to pick up a used GTX 980 Ti at a bargain price from an early GTX 1080 adopter.