The new series 10 of Nvidia GeForce cards has been very well received by gamers thanks to the solid price-to-performance ratio found in its models. Even so, rumors about the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti began to pile up. With the imminent debut of AMD's Vega GPUs, the GTX 1080 Ti looks like a preventive strike by Nvidia, offering hardware very similar to the Titan X at a lower price.
The competition can be felt in the air. The available hardware is increasingly attractive, and within months prices drop like stones. Of course, manufacturers always see that as a nightmare, but it's the consumer who foots the bill. It only took a couple of leaked AMD Ryzen benchmarks to prove Intel's stagnation in performance. Fortunately, the graphics card market moves at a different pace, and the exchanges between Nvidia and AMD are much more interesting. The green giant from Santa Clara managed to maintain some advantage thanks to its series 10, especially the GeForce GTX 1060, a wolf in sheep's clothing that doesn't exceed 230 euros. However, rumors about a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti were quick to reach critical mass. If you didn't buy the original 1080 and plan to invest soon, maybe you want to read this first.
Almost a Titan X
Basically, what Nvidia is doing here is delivering a "reduced" version of the Titan X, and I put it in quotes because the differences are not that big. The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti comes with 11GB of GDDR5X RAM, a 352-bit bus, and 88 pipelines, against the 12GB / 384-bit / 96 pipelines of the Titan X. As has happened in previous models, Nvidia's strategy is to compensate for these hardware changes with higher frequencies, and in the vast majority of cases, that should be enough to put the 1080 Ti above the Titan X (which, by the way, costs $1,200). Although the TDP stays at 250 watts, Nvidia decided to eliminate the DVI connector on the 1080 Ti to optimize its cooling (the card includes a DisplayPort to DVI adapter).
Pricing and Availability
Another important detail is that the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti will hit shelves with the same design as the Founders Edition cards, which brings us directly to its price: $699, the old spot of the original "1080 Founders Edition". What will happen to previous hardware? A price cut. The scale becomes: $699 for the 1080 Ti, $549 for the 1080 Founders Edition, and $499 for the standard 1080. Add to that Nvidia's confirmation that OEMs will be able to sell the cards with "factory overclocking", so we're going to see very active price development. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti debuts on March 10.
