There’s no doubt about it: The GTX 1080 Ti is pixel-pushing monster made for the greediest of graphic whores. It’s around 30 percent faster than a GTX 1080, and as much as 60 percent faster than a GTX 1070 at 1080p. More importantly, it’s 70 percent faster than a GTX 980 Ti, and offers over double the performance of a GTX 980. If you’re still rocking a GTX 780 Ti and considering an upgrade, the GTX 1080 Ti offers over three times the performance.
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The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is NVIDIA’s new flagship gaming graphics card, based on the NVIDIA Pascal architecture. The latest addition to the ultimate gaming platform, this graphics card is packed with extreme gaming horsepower, next-gen 11 Gbps GDDR5X memory, and a massive 11 GB frame buffer.
The GTX 1080Ti performs better than GTX 1080 and is priced significantly higher than it. Those with deep enough pockets can pick up a Founders Edition GTX 1080 Ti directly from Nvidia on March 9, with partner cards arriving in the following weeks. Both are priced at the same £700/$700/INR 63000, which makes a nice change from the premium Nvidia used to charge for the Founders Edition. That said, Nvidia hasn’t got the best track record with getting graphics cards into shops on release day, so expect inflated prices until availability levels out.
GeForce GTX 1080Ti
Detailed Review
The Outside (Specifications)
The GTX 1080 Ti comes wrapped in Nvidia’s slick, multifaceted cooling shroud—a blower-style design made of die-cast aluminum complete with a low-profile backplate and copper vapor chamber. With the 1080Ti Nvidia has decided to do away with the DVI port. They claim that this would double the air-flow as compared to the GTX 1080 but that’s purely subjective in my opinion. What the removal of the DVI port does do is that it allows modders to create a single-slot water-cooled version of the GTX 1080 Ti without having to hack the port off or de-solder it.
The GTX 1080Ti comes with improved seven-phase 2x dual-FET power design for cleaner power with less heat, which does a good job of feeding the GTX 1080 Ti’s 250W TDP via its 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connectors. At the heart of the GTX 1080 Ti is the same Pascal architecture GP102 GPU used in the Titan XP. There are the same 28 SMs and 3,584 CUDA cores out of a possible 3,840, meaning the GTX 1080 Ti still doesn’t use a fully enabled GPU. Oh Well, you couldn’t guess that by looking at the numbers. The 1080 Ti has some special GDDR5X memory chips that can be pushed to an impressive 11GHz. Coupled with a 352-bit memory interface, the GTX 1080 Ti has a memory bandwidth of 484GB/s, which is a teensy bit higher than the Titan XP’s 480GB/s and miles ahead of the GTX 1080’s 320GB/s.
Alongside the GTX 1080 Ti, Nvidia is dropping a few improvements to its drivers, as well as new features for developers. Most notable for consumers is further improved performance under DirectX 12. Which clearly shows their intent of not dropping the ball on the DX12 like they did with the GTX 1080 last year.
The Inside (Performance)
We tested the Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti on a decent rig, which we expect to be the target market for the GPU. The gamer who buys this GPU is expected to have a higher level PC rig. Unfortunately by the time this review was written, we couldn’t test the card on a 4K display, but the review will be updated once we have more details on its performance on 4K. We used 3D Mark and Heaven uni-engine to Benchmark the game through Basic, Custom and Extreme settings. For sustained performance we focused on games like Watch_Dogs 2, FIFA 17 and The Division. We would be updating this review with more games as time goes on.
On the benchmarks as expected, the GTX 1080Ti blows it out of the water. We scaled everything up to the max, and it didn’t even stutter. Didn’t even bat an eyelid. Infact the Benchmarks score from the Firestrike Test scores above 97% of all the scores ever collected by the tool. That is impressive if it ever was one. All the test were done on 1080p display.
On the FPS front, the performance is as impressive as expected. Those who already own a Titan XP will see very similar charts. While the Founders Edition card on test easily boosted past its rated clock speed to a steady 1734MHz thanks to Nvidia’s GPU Boost. The highest it would overclock (without voltage tweaks) was 1900MHz with a somewhat noisy 70 percent fan speed. Once that was done however, we didn’t overclock the memory in fear of what we might break.
There was some noticeable sound when we over-clocked the GTX 1080Ti, but nothing too disturbing. the 750 W PSU was also able to handle power drainage with aplomb. As far as heat was concerned, I did see the temperature rising as high as 80 C during the benchmarks, but that was about it.
That being said, there is little motivation for someone who owns a Titan to upgrade to the 1080Ti. Similarly, if you are into e-sports, then using a 1080 Ti is probably not on your must-buy list. The GPU really comes into its own at higher resolutions and is probably the best aimed at gamers who don’t like tweaking their GPU and still get the best performance possible for almost all the games once could expect. The GPU is 4K and VR ready, and while we wait for another generation to pass and make them both mainstream, we have the GTX 1080Ti to tide us over.
