1080Ti flops: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Specs

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In what has now become a bona fide tradition for NVIDIA, at their GDC event this evening the company announced their next flagship video card, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Something of a poorly kept secret – NVIDIA’s website accidentally spilled the beans last week – the GTX 1080 Ti is NVIDIA’s big Pascal refresh for the year, finally rolling out their most powerful consumer GPU, GP102, into a GeForce video card.

The Ti series of cards isn’t new for NVIDIA. The company has used the moniker for their higher-performance cards since the GTX 700 series back in 2013. However no two generations have really been alike. For the Pascal generation in particular, NVIDIA has taken the almighty Titan line in a more professional direction, so whereas a Ti card would be a value Titan in past generations – and this is still technically true here – it serves as more of a flagship for the Pascal generation GeForce.

At any rate, we knew that NVIDIA would release a GP102 card for the GeForce market sooner or later, and at long last it’s here. Based on a not-quite-fully-enabled GP102 GPU (more on this in a second), like its predecessors the GTX 1080 Ti is meant to serve as a mid-generation performance boost for the high-end video card market. In this case NVIDIA is aiming for what they’re calling their greatest performance jump yet for a Ti product – around 35% on average – which would translate into a sizable upgrade for GeForce GTX 980 Ti owners and others for whom GTX 1080 wasn’t the card they were looking for.

NVIDIA GPU Specification Comparison
	GTX 1080 Ti	NVIDIA Titan X	GTX 1080	GTX 980 Ti
CUDA Cores	3584	3584	2560	2816
Texture Units	224	224	160	176
ROPs	88	96	64	96
Core Clock	?	1417MHz	1607MHz	1000MHz
Boost Clock	1582MHz	1531MHz	1733MHz	1075MHz
TFLOPs (FMA)	11. 3 TFLOPs	11 TFLOPs	9 TFLOPs	6.1 TFLOPs
Memory Clock	11Gbps GDDR5X	10Gbps GDDR5X	10Gbps GDDR5X	7Gbps GDDR5
Memory Bus Width	352-bit	384-bit	256-bit	384-bit
VRAM	11GB	12GB	8GB	6GB
FP64	1/32	1/32	1/32	1/32
FP16 (Native)	1/64	1/64	1/64	N/A
INT8	4:1	4:1	N/A	N/A
TDP	250W	250W	180W	250W
GPU	GP102	GP102	GP104	GM200
Transistor Count	12B	12B	7. 2B	8B
Die Size	471mm2	471mm2	314mm2	601mm2
Manufacturing Process	TSMC 16nm	TSMC 16nm	TSMC 16nm	TSMC 28nm
Launch Date	03/2017	08/02/2016	05/27/2016	06/01/2015
Launch Price	$699	$1200	MSRP: $599 Founders $699	$649

We’ll start as always with the GPU at the heart of the card, GP102. With NVIDIA’s business now supporting a dedicated compute GPU – the immense GP100 – GP102 doesn’t qualify for the “Big Pascal” moniker like past iterations have. But make no mistake, GP102 is quite a bit larger than the GP104 GPU at the heart of the GTX 1080, and that translates to a lot more hardware for pushing pixels.

GTX 1080 Ti ships with 28 of GP102’s 30 SMs enabled. For those of you familiar with the not-quite-consumer NVIDIA Titan X (Pascal), this is the same configuration as that card, and in fact there are a lot of similarities between those two cards. Though for this generation the situation is not going to be cut & dry as in the past; the GTX 1080 Ti is not strictly a subset of the Titan.

The big difference on the hardware front is that NVIDIA has stripped GP102 of some of its memory/ROP/L2 capacity, which was fully enabled on the Titan. Of the 96 ROPs we get 88; the last ROP block, its memory controller, and 256KB of L2 cache have been disabled.

However what the GTX 1080 Ti lacks in functional units it’s partially making up in clockspeeds, both in regards to the core and the memory. While the base clock has not yet been disclosed, the boost clock of the GTX 1080 Ti is 1582MHz, about 50MHz higher than its Titan counterpart. More significantly, the memory clock on the GTX 1080 Ti is 11Gbps, a 10% increase over the 10Gbps clock found on the Titan and the GTX 1080. Combined with the 352-bit memory bus, and we’re looking at 484GB/sec of memory bandwidth for the GTX 1080 Ti.

Taken altogether then, the GTX 1080 Ti offers just over 11.3 TFLOPS of FP32 performance. This puts the expected shader/texture performance of the card 28% ahead of the current GTX 1080, while the ROP throughput advantage stands 26%, and memory bandwidth at a much greater 51.2%. Real-world performance will of course be influenced by a blend of these factors, so I’ll be curious to see how much the major jump in memory bandwidth helps given that the ROPs aren’t seeing the same kind of throughput boost. Otherwise, relative to the NVIDIA Titan X, the two cards should end up quite close, trading blows now and then.

Speaking of the Titan, on an interesting side note, it doesn’t look like NVIDIA is going to be doing anything to hurt the compute performance of the GTX 1080 Ti to differentiate the card from the Titan, which has proven popular with GPU compute customers. Crucially, this means that the GTX 1080 Ti gets the same 4:1 INT8 performance ratio of the Titan, which is critical to the cards’ high neural networking inference performance. As a result the GTX 1080 Ti actually has slighty greater compute performance (on paper) than the Titan. And NVIDIA has been surprisingly candid in admitting that unless compute customers need the last 1GB of VRAM offered by the Titan, they’re likely going to buy the GTX 1080 Ti instead.

Speaking of memory, as I mentioned before the card will be shipping with 11 pieces of 11Gbps GDDR5X. The faster memory clock comes courtesy of a new generation of GDDR5X memory chips from partner Micron, who after a bit of a rocky start with GDDR5X development, is finally making progress on boosting memory speeds that definitely has NVIDIA pleased. Until now NVIDIA’s GPUs and boards have been ready for the higher frequency memory, and the memory is just now catching up.

Moving on, the card’s 250W TDP should not come as a surprise. This has been NVIDIA’s segment TDP of choice for Titan and Ti cards for a while now, and the GTX 1080 Ti isn’t deviating from that.

However the cooling system has seen a small but important overhaul: the DVI port is gone, opening up the card to be a full slot blower. In order to offer a DVI port along with a number of DisplayPorts/HDMI ports, NVIDIA has traditionally blocked part of the card’s second slot to house the DVI port. But with GTX 1080 Ti, that port is finally gone, and that gives the GTX 1080 Ti the interesting distinction being the first unobstructed high-end GeForce card since the GTX 580. The end result is that NVIDIA is promising a decent increase in cooling performance relative to the GTX 980 Ti and similar designs. We’ll have to see how NVIDIA has tuned the card to understand the full impact of this change, but this likely will further improve on NVIDIA’s already great acoustics.

Meanwhile the end result of removing the DVI port means that the GTX 1080 Ti’s display I/O has been pared down to just a mix of HDMI and DisplayPorts. Altogether we’re looking at 3x DisplayPort 1.4 ports and 1x HDMI 2.0 port. As a consolation to owners who may still be using DVI-based monitors, the company will be including a DisplayPort to DVI adapter with the card (presumably DP to SL-DVI and not DL-DVI), but it’s clear that DVI’s days are now numbered over at NVIDIA.

Moving on, for card designs NVIDIA is once again going to be working with partners to offer a mix of reference and custom designs. The GTX 1080 Ti will initially be offered in a Founder’s Edition design, while partners are also bringing up their own semi and fully custom designs to be released a bit later. Importantly however, unlike the GTX 1080 & GTX 1070, NVIDIA has done away with the Founder’s Edition premium for the GTX 1080 Ti. The MSRP of the card will be the MSRP for both the Founder’s Edition and partners’ custom cards. This makes pricing more consistent, though I’m curious to see how this plays out with partners, as they benefitted from the premium in the form of more attractive pricing for their own cards.

Finally, speaking of pricing, let’s talk about the launch date and availability. Just in time for Pi Day, NVIDIA will be launching the card on the week of March 5th (Update: an exact date has finally been revealed: Friday, March 10th). As for pricing, long-time price watchers may be surprised. NVIDIA will be releasing the card at $699, the old price of the GTX 1080 Founder’s Edition (which itself just got a price cut). This does work out to a bit higher than the GTX 980 Ti — it launched at $649 two years ago — but it’s more aggressive than I had been expecting given the GTX 1080’s launch price last year.

In any case, at this time the high-end video card market is NVIDIA’s to command. AMD doesn’t offer anything competitive with the GTX 1070 and above, so the GTX 1080 Ti will stand alone at the top of the consumer video card market. Long-term here AMD isn’t hesitating to note their work on Vega, but that’s a bridge to be crossed only once those cards get here.

Gallery: GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

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Official nVidia GTX 1080 Ti Specs: 3584 Cores, 11GB GDDR5X | GamersNexus

NVidia just opened the floodgate on its GTX 1080 Ti video card, the Pascal-based mid-step between the GTX 1080 and GTX Titan X. The 1080 Ti opens up SMs over the GTX 1080, now totaling 28 SMs over the 1080’s 20 SMs, resulting in 3584 total FP32 CUDA cores on the GTX 1080 Ti. Simultaneous multiprocessor architecture remains the same – Pascal hasn’t changed, here – leaving us with primary changes in the memory subsystem.

The GTX 1080 Ti will host 11GB of GDDR5X memory – not HBM2 – with a speed of 11Gbps. This is boosted over the GTX 1080’s 10Gbps GDDR5X memory speeds, resultant of work done by memory supplier Micron to clean the signal. The heavy transition cluttering of early G5X iterations have been reduced, allowing a cleaner signal in the GDDR5X cells without data corruption concerns. We’ll have some news below on how this also relates to existing Pascal cards.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Official Specs vs. GTX 1080

NVIDIA Pascal Specs Comparison
	Tesla P100	GTX 1080 Ti	GTX 1080	GTX 1070
GPU	GP100 Cut-Down Pascal	GP102 Pascal	GP104-400 Pascal	GP104-200 Pascal
Transistor Count	15.3B	12B	7.2B	7.2B
Fab Process	16nm FinFET	16nm FinFET	16nm FinFET	16nm FinFET
CUDA Cores	3584	3584	2560	1920
GPCs	6	6	4	3
SMs	56	28	20	15
TPCs	28 TPCs		20 TPCs	15
TMUs	224	224	160	120
ROPs	96 (?)	88	64	64
Core Clock	1328MHz	—	1607MHz	1506MHz
Boost Clock	1480MHz	1600MHz	1733MHz	1683MHz
FP32 TFLOPs	10. 6TFLOPs	~11.4TFLOPs	9TFLOPs	6.5TFLOPs
Memory Type	HBM2	GDDR5X	GDDR5X	GDDR5
Memory Capacity	16GB	11GB	8GB	8GB
Memory Clock	?	11Gbps	10Gbps GDDR5X	4006MHz
Memory Interface	4096-bit	352-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Memory Bandwidth	?	~484GBs	320.32GB/s	256GB/s
Total Power Budget («TDP»)	300W	250W	180W	150W
Power Connectors	?	1x 8-pin 1x 6-pin	1x 8-pin	1x 8-pin
Release Date	4Q16-1Q17	TBD	5/27/2016	6/10/2016
Release Price	—	$700	Reference: $700 MSRP: $600 Now: $500	Reference: $450 MSRP: $380

Price update: GTX 1080 Ti MSRP is $700. Availability starts next week (second week of March).

Our video is live here (can’t embed as we are reporting on-site): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk4qwHiG7f4

The GTX 1080 Ti GP102 GPU is comprised of 12B transistors, capable of operating jointly at 1600MHz (boost) or near 2000MHz overclocked. GP102 is built of 6 graphics processing clusters, containing 28 SMs (3584 CUDA cores, at 128*28), 88 ROPs, and 224 TMUs. The memory interface is 352-bit.

NVidia stuck with GDDR5X on the 1080 Ti for many reasons, cost surely one of them, but also noted that today’s GDDR5X options are capable of greater bandwidths than today’s HBM2 options. NVidia ships memory packages of each type (HBM2 on Tesla P100 accelerators) and has experience with HBM2, but believe GDDR5X to be the better solution for gaming and production workloads today. GDDR5X is presently faster, offers more bandwidth, and can be had in greater capacities than HBM2 alternatives (particularly when considering price deltas). G5X, for instance, is shipped at 11GB on the GTX 1080 Ti, whereas HBM2 would have limited the nVidia team to 8GB with its current design.

The GTX 1080 Ti will ship in a Founders Edition variant ahead of AIB partner cards, which will exist only “virtually” until a later date. Price and release date, as of this writing, are TBD – but we will update this promptly with the information. The GTX 1080 Ti will utilize a 7-phase dual-FET power design, with two FETs per phase to effectively halve current going through the individual components, and spread heat over a larger area. The cooler has also been updated, with DVI removed from the I/O to open up cooling channels at the back-end of the card, with the heatsink remaining a vapor chamber design. NVidia advertises its cooling pathway optimizations (and modified baseplate to accommodate the new power design) improve thermals of ~5C at an equal noise output (35dBA). We’ll validate independently.

Speaking of heat, as we understand it, total power budget is 250W (250A at ~1v) with 1x 8-pin + 1x 6-pin headers. We should expect the temperature threshold for clock limitations to likely still exist around ~83C, but the cooling path optimizations and new baseplate configuration should help with this.

NVidia plants the 1080 Ti approximately 35% ahead of the GTX 1080, but we’ll validate that independently. Price and TBD will go live tonight, and we will likely update this article within 15 minutes of its posting for that information. As always, we recommend waiting for our review prior to any orders.

Other News: MemOC SKU GTX 1060 6GB & GTX 1080 Cards

In other, brief news for the evening, nVidia announced new support of memory overclocked SKUs of the GTX 1060 6GB and GTX 1080 video cards. These cards will be available at 9Gbps for the GTX 1060 6GB and 11Gbps for the GTX 1080, a full 1Gbps faster on the memory for each option. As we understand it, AIB partners will carry these independently, with no expected reference models.

Follow closely for several more news and review items this week – there’ll be many.

Update: GTX 1080 (non-Ti) price updated to $500 MSRP.

Update: For future validation, nVidia claims the high-end render demo during the event operated the Ti at ~66C with 2038MHz GPU clock, with memory at 5603MHz (*2).

Editorial: Steve Burke
Video: Keegan Gallick

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Why is Palit GTX 1080 Ti GameRock Premium better than Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080?

• 4.02 TFLOPS higher than FLOPS?
  12. 24 TFLOPS vs 8.23 ​​TFLOPS
• 21.7 GPixel/s higher pixel rate?
  150.3 GPixel/s vs 128.6 GPixel/s
• 37.5% more VRAM?
  11GB vs 8GB
• 1008MHz higher effective clock speed?
  11008MHz vs 10000MHz
• 125.5 GTexels/s higher number of textured pixels? more memory bandwidth?
  484.4GB/s vs 320GB/s
• 96bit wider memory bus?
  352bit vs 256bit
• 1024 more stream processors?
  3584 vs 2560

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