Introduction

After weeks of rumors and some less-than-subtle hints from NVIDIA themselves, the GTX 1080 Ti was announced at GDC less than two weeks ago. We all knew this was coming, with a convenient media event scheduled for the same day as the competition, but we got more concrete information from the green camp this time around, including pricing and availability of the GTX 1080 Ti.



The flagship Ti moniker has served NVIDIA well these past three generations, with the GTX 780 Ti based on the full GK110 die and offering higher single precision performance than the original Titan to the point where a new Titan Black was released based off the same die and architecture.

The GTX 1080 Ti is a similar story - take the GP102 with a disabled SM as with the current Titan X Pascal, include one less GB of VRAM, and increase stock frequencies for both memory and GPU and we essentially have a GeForce flagship that aims to offer Titan X performance at less than 60% the price point. It was a long time coming with the Titan X announced over seven months ago, but for those who felt the $1200 price point was not reasonable, we have with us a new option from NVIDIA. No FP64 benefits to the Titan SKU this time around means that gamers, programmers, and developers alike will find this GTX 1080 Ti review well worth the read.



The Pascal architecture, used by all GeForce 10 cards, obviously hasn't changed. Compared to the Titan X Pascal, which has 12 GB, the GTX 1080 Ti comes with 11 GB, which means one physical memory chip less on the board (11 chips vs. 12 chips). This changes memory bus width, which has gone down to 352-bit. Less memory bus width also means fewer ROPs, which are at 88 now. The number of shader units has been untouched and stays at 3584.

Today's review is of the NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition, a version designed and produced by NVIDIA. It comes with the stunning-looking NVIDIA reference cooler design and a price point of $700. Board partners are already hard at work creating their own custom designs for the GTX 1080 Ti, which will be released from next month onward.