NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080 TI
Better than a Titan X
A YEAR AGO, we reviewed Nvidia’s first Pascal card, the GTX 1080. Coming in at $700, it shocked the tech sphere with its exceptional performance. It wasn’t just a rebadge, or a meager 10 percent improvement over the previous generation, but a card that took the last-gen Titan X, and threw it to the curb. Nvidia justified the price by saying it was just right for the stunning level of performance. The tech community faltered—a card that would usually cost around $500 was hit by an increase of almost 40 percent.
Fast-forward 10 months, and the ecosystem hasn’t entirely changed. Nvidia is still ruling the roost when it comes to those heady graphical heights, and with the developer-focused Titan X coming in at an eye-watering $1,200, for what amounts to a 10–15 percent performance increase over its GTX 1080 sibling, the GTX 1080 was the go-to choice. Until now.
The new GTX 1080 Ti costs $700. Like an odd, red-headed stepchild, it sits eagerly between the GTX 1080 and Titan XP early adopters. Featuring the same full-fat 12 billion transistor-laden GP102 core found in the Titan XP, the Ti also comes with the same 3,584 CUDA cores and 224 Texture Units. The big one, though, is the VRAM, or rather, the butchering that’s occurred to that poor Titan’s core: 11GB of GDDR5X, instead of 12GB, a 352-bit bus versus a 384bit memory bus, and, of course, 88 ROPs— eight fewer than the XP. Apart from that, the Ti gets some significant upgrades when it comes to clock speeds. It has a tighter and higher base to boost clock, and also comes packing an 11Gb/s memory clock, versus the rest of the 1000 series’s 10Gb/s.
What about performance? In all honesty, it’s very impressive. This is the first card we’ve seen hit near enough 60fps averages in our testing suite at 4K, with all the tests ramped up, hitting 56fps in FarCryPrimal, and 55 in The Division. Rise of the Tomb Raider still tanks fairly low, at consolelevel frame rates, hitting 29fps, with Attila matching at 27, but all in all, it’s good.
GPU Boost helps no end, with our particular retail card hitting 1,800MHz on the core clock—almost 300MHz higher than the rated turbo clock. This was a trend that we pushed further in overclocking. Using EVGA’s Precision XOC, we managed to bump up the core clocks by an additional 155MHz, and the memory by a staggering 500MHz, leaving us with a max core clock of 2,062MHz, and memory at 6GHz, giving us a total of 12Gb/s bandwidth, leading to a 10 percent improvement in both minimum and average frame rates at 4K, while simultaneously bumping up our Fire Strike figures by almost 2,000 points at 1080p.
All things considered, the GTX 1080 Ti is something of an odd ball. With 11GB of VRAM, and a butchered memory architecture to complement its Frankenstein memory speed, plus that strong overclocking potential, it outperforms a card that essentially costs $500 more, and comes in at the same price that the GTX 1080 cost 10 months ago (that’s 50 cents degradation in value per day for the lucky FE owners out there). That said, it’s hard to argue against the computational prowess of this phenomenal GPU, and despite the price-gouging Nvidia is arguably leveraging due to the lack of any significant competition, this still, oddly, feels like a good deal.