NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition
The card to get for 4K gaming, at only the price of the previous flagship.
NVIDIA has put AMD on the defensive once again. Expectations were high for the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, particularly after NVIDIA announced tantalizingly that it would be faster than the 2016 Titan X, and the good news is that it more than lives up to those lofty standards.
To handle the additional power, it boasts an upgraded 7-phase 2x dual-FET power design for cleaner power and less heat. The card relies on a copper vapor chamber and large dual-slot aluminum heatsink for cooling, and the design has actually been tweaked to run quieter and cooler than the GeForce GTX 1080.
This is a 250 watt TDP card, and power is supplied to it via 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connectors. In comparison, the GeForce GTX 1080 is a 180 watt card that requires just a single 8-pin connector.
It is designed with the same GP102 as the Pascalbased Titan X and features 28 SMs and 3,584 CUDA cores, so the GPU has still not been fully enabled (that honor has been reserved for the justannounced Titan Xp).
The 11GB of GDDR5X memory is clocked at 11,000MHz, and combined with the 352-bit memory bus gives you a total bandwidth of 484GB/s, which is marginally higher than the Titan X’s 480GB/s.
If you’re still disappointed that NVIDIA has skipped over including High Bandwidth Memory this time, you’ll be pleased to see that this figure is actually really close to the 512GB/s offered by the HBM-equipped AMD Radeon R9 Fury X.
On the performance front, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti impresses with its 4K gaming performance.
It managed to push out more or less playable frame rates – over 30fps – on Ultra settings and a 4K resolution in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. We should point out that Mankind Divided is one of the most demanding games you can run right now, so if the card can handle it at 4K, it should be comfortable handling pretty much anything else.
Overall, NVIDIA’s new flagship is around 30 per cent quicker than the GeForce GTX 1080, a nice jump in the same generation of cards. It also overclocks very well, and was able to hit boost clocks of as high as 2,050MHz.
