Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang took to a company live stream event to announce their newest tech innovation, the GTX 10 series graphics cards.
Nvidia’s latest announcement is kind of a big deal. Jen-Hsun Huang, the company CEO announced via live stream that they are revolutionizing the gaming industry with their newest billion dollar investment, the GTX 1080 and 1070 graphics cards. Outperforming the entire 9-series, these new cards are an incredible upgrade at an incredible price. Marking a giant leap by Nvidia, towards getting the PC world VR Ready.
While remaining coy about how many billions of dollars these GPUs took to develop, the architecture is clearly where most of the money went. Setting many world firsts, the 10 series cards use the newly developed Pascal Architecture. This includes 16NM FinFET process to transfer data through Micron Technology’s ultra-fast G5X memory. Memory so fast, that it can read and transfer data in 100 picoseconds (the amount of time it takes light to travel 1″).
In addition to pure horsepower, the 10-series are also the most energy efficient GPUs to date. While seemingly insignificant to non-treehuggers, the simple fact is that like any other product, the more efficiently it can operate, the higher its performance output will be. The craftsmanship of the 10 series was the result of what Huang describes as “Thousands of small ideas, hundreds of big ones and a few groundbreaking ones”.
Declining to go into too many details, Huang was able to dig deeper into the 1080’s energy efficiency. The philosophy behind the engineering is to play any game on maxed out settings with no lag, at the GPU’s entire range of operation. Meaning that should a peaceful background in a video game be interrupted by online enemies or a horde of NPCs and suddenly require the maximum amount of wattage it can get, the player will experience little to no change in latency. Whether operating off of 60W or 180W, the 1080 will perform with almost 90% efficiency.
Between the intricate design and quality of the 10 series, the biggest news for these GPUs is that not only are they more powerful than the Nvidia 980 SLI (2 GTX 980s operating together), it’s efficiency and quality greatly outperform the Titan series graphics cards as well. Meaning that while early adopters of VR Ready graphics cards shelled out crazy amounts of money on last year’s technology, their sacrifice was not in vain as it inspired Nvidia to create something better for half the price.
While all of it’s technological advancements provide a glimpse into the overall power of the 10-series, these GPUs are also capable of intricate new applications. Ansel, the new photography tool designed for the Geforce experience, can capture in game moments using a free flowing camera, Super high resolution and full 360 degree capture for regular and VR viewing. In addition to photo-realistic VR, the new Simultaneous multi-projection technology optimizes the field of view to multi-screen monitor layouts. Ensuring that the field of view for a game won’t be hindered by the angling of individual monitors, and can be configured to provide a proper perspective of the environment.
However, as greatly as any GPU can perform, the ultimate deal breaker between quality and subpar performance will always be the price. The most exciting news out of the event is that the GTX 10-series are available at $599 for the GTX 1080 (the highest performance model), and $379 for the 1070 (a more budgetary model the still outperforms the Titan). Both of which are well below the Titan’s $999 price tag. For about $100 more, however, users can purchase a Founder’s Edition of either model, which are built with speed binned chips for over clocked performance.
For a full breakdown of everything that was mentioned in the announcement, gamers can head over to Nvidia’s official YouTube page. The entire conference has been broken down into separate videos which actually highlight all of the various components of the new 10-series GPUs.
The Nvidia GTX 1080 will launch first on May 27 for $599 ($699 Founders Edition), with the 1070 following afterwards on June 10 for $379 ($449 Founder’s Edition).
