Last Friday, Nvidia unveiled the GTX 1080 and the GTX 1070 and to all our surprise, Nvidia boldly went out and claimed that the 1070 will be not only more powerful than a GTX 980, but will also surpass the 980 Ti as well as the Titan. Many of us PC hardware enthusiasts have noticed the overflow of second hand GTX 980 Ti’s up for sale in the past week, and that’s increasing by the moment. The idea of getting a card more powerful than Titan at the mere cost of 399$ (30K INR approx) is simply enticing.
We all know that building a PC is more of a battle against money if not for some of the other major issues that come with a modern gaming PC build. AMD has been making affordable GPUs since their 7000 series and coming into the next generation, they have been continuing the same trend. Nvidia has always been for the upper class gamers who are able to dish out cash at a whim. And for years both these companies have tried to breach into each other’s domain. Nvidia trying to push entry level with their GTX 950s and AMD trying to outperform (At 4K AMD did outperform Nvidia) through it’s latest R9 Fury series. But the unveiling of the GTX 1080 and 1070 will be crucial to the PC gaming community.
Why, you ask. Well for one, coming in at 399$, if a GTX 1070 has more to offer than the beastly GTX 980 Ti and Titan, we can assume to a good extent that the GTX 1060 and 1050 will follow the same trend and 1060 most probably will be more powerful than the GTX 970 and may in fact be more closer in performance to the 980 than the 970 and the same goes for the 1050 as well to accomlish more than the 960 and ossibly be close to 970. Though the 1060 will be releasing in Q3 of this year, it’ll be worth the wait for those on a budget and looking for a mid ranged card. With such levels of performance coming this cheap, a PC build with an easily affordable GTX 1050 will give you better performance than any of the consoles (Not sure about the PS4 Neo till the benchmarks come out) at a cheaper price (If you know how to build a custom PC).
Second, if Nvidia has made a card with such high levels of performance, AMD is obviously going to come up with something almost as good, if not better owing to the fact that their card R9 Fury X beat the 980 Ti at 4K. If AMD is able to achieve this with the Polaris GPUs that are going to be unveiled in the coming few weeks, the torch of competition will be lit again after quite a few years of Nvidia market domination. AMD has been growing in terms of their reach with the processors and GPUs and their recently announced SSDs. AMD could possibly make a huge dent in the market if Polaris is as good as they are claiming it to be. In fact AMD could decrease the price of their older higher end cards considerably, if they are not able to meet the performance level of the newer Nvidia and AMD cards.
Also even with the PS4K coming out, many people are doubting that it’ll live up to it’s name, ie, run games at 4K. Many techies are speculating that the PS4K will just be able to render 4K images and videos. It will probably be targeted for proper 1080p gaming with 60 fps. Games are far away from being played at 4K with even the best graphics cards out there struggling to keep pace with 4K. But with the release of these two cards, the 4K race has been blown open. Both have 8 GB RAM which is good enough for 4K gaming with med settings at 30 fps lock (At least). It’ll be interesting to see what the GTX 1080 Ti will have to offer. At this pace, we might see 4K becoming a trend by Q3 of next year.
The last but not the least, the cards coming out from now on will be focussed on VR because that is actually the next gen. Both these cards have 8 GB of RAM, and have been made specifically for VR and multi-monitor setups. If a GTX 970 can handle VR at decent quality and a GTX 980 Ti and Titan can be great at it, we can easily assume that both GTX 1070 and 1080 will be pushing on the VR segment, thus automatically pushing the erformance for non-VR games.
This being said, the question still stands:
How will this Generation of GPUs affect the console wars?
Well, the hardware capabilities are increasing at an exponential rate and we can clearly see that through the performance gap between the performance of just one generations. Consoles have one basic principle of ‘Static Hardware’ and with such rate of increase in hardware capabilities, it is difficult to keep a static hardware and not compromise on performance or quality. One solution maybe that the life-cycle of a console can be reduced to 2 or 3 years which is quite visible with the PS4 Neo and Xbox 1.5(Or whatever it is called), but then again, when you can build a PC more powerful than a console and cheaper than one too, the point of a console will be gone. It’s not the end of consoles, but Sony and Microsoft do need to change the way at how they are going to be approaching their respective consoles, since they heavily depend on 3rd party games even though they do make in-house exclusives (Not the case with Xbox now).
So how do you think the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 will affect the Console Wars? Do you think that the release of the GTX 1080 and 1070 is significant in pushing PC gaming even more ahead. Let us know that and more in the comments below. Adios.
(Not the case with Xbox now) lol