Titan X at half the price

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition

CONCLUSION: A beastly card that outclasses last generation’s undisputed flagship.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 is fast. In fact, it’s the fastest card on the planet right now. But it’s also fairly expensive, and you probably don’t need that much performance. Enter the GeForce GTX 1070 – another beastly card, but with a slightly more palatable price. The GeForce GTX 1070 is based on the same GP104 GPU as the 1080, but with certain functional units disabled. While the latter card boasted a total of 20 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), the GeForce GTX 1070 has 15. Each SM houses 128 CUDA cores, so this brings the number of CUDA cores to 1,920, 25 percent lower than the flagship Pascal card. Each Graphics Processing Cluster (GPC) features 16 render output units (ROPs) and 40 texture mapping units (eight in each SM). But because the GeForce GTX 1070 actually still has 64 render output units (ROPs) – the same as its bigger brother – and 120 texture mapping units (TMUs), it looks like NVIDIA hasn’t disabled a single GPC entirely on the 1070. Instead, it appears to have selectively put certain SMs out of action in each GPC, resulting in the same number of ROPs as the GeForce GTX 1080, but 25 percent fewer TMUs.

And thanks to the new Pascal architecture, the GeForce GTX 1070 is equipped with fairly aggressive clock speeds as well, to the tune of a 1,506MHz base clock and 1,683MHz boost clock. Unlike the GeForce GTX 1080 however, the 1070 doesn’t use GDDR5X memory, relying instead on the more traditional GDDR5 variant. Its 8GB of GDDR5 memory is clocked at 8,000MHz, but both Pascal cards share the same 256-bit memory bus. For the GeForce GTX 1070, this translates into a total available bandwidth figure of 256GB/s, a fair bit behind the GTX 1080’s 320GB/s. With all that said, the GeForce GTX 1070 delivers admirably on what it promises. In our benchmarks, which includes newer titles like Tom Clancy’s The Division and Hitman, the GeForce GTX 1070 was neck-andneck with the Titan X, last generation’s ultraenthusiast card. In fact, it outstripped it at times by a small margin, all while costing significantly less. At $768, that’s less than half the price of what the Titan X used to go for. That’s a good deal if we ever saw one.

AT A GLANCE

GPU TRANSISTOR COUNT: 7.2 billion

CORE CLOCK: 1,506MHz

MEMORY: 8GB GDDR5

MEMORY CLOCK: 8,000MHz

PRICE: $768

The card requires a single 8-pin PCIe connector for power.