NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080 TI
It feels like only yesterday we were sat here declaring the GTX 1080 as the true king of 4K gaming. But
honestly, the Ti was not something we expected. The 1080 was priced resolutely at £700 on average,
and the Titan X was sitting pretty at a huge £1,200 for a meagre 10-15% improvement in frame rates.Now there’s this Frankenstein’s monster of a
graphics card solution. What do we mean by that?
Let’s compare the 1080 Ti and the Titan X. By
default the 1080 Ti has the same, fully loaded
GP102 core featuring 12 billion transistors, the same
3,584 CUDA cores, and the same 224 of texture
units as found in the £500 more expensive Titan XP.
However, that’s where the similarities end. The
VRAM in particular is the most intriguing. The
Ti loses 1GB of GDDR5X, dropping it down to
11GB total, on a 352-bit bus against the
Titan’s 384. Yet rather intriguingly, it has an11Gbps memory clock as opposed to the rest of the
10 series. All this on top of having higher, and tighter
base and boost clocks.
This card, if ever there was one, is the Titan killer
we all expected from AMD, not Nvidia. Not only does
it perform outstandingly at 4K (56fps in Far Cry
Primal, and 55 in The Division), but it’s also shunted
the rest of Nvidia’s 10 series down in price.LITHOGRAPHY: 16NM FINFET / TRANSISTOR COUNT: 12 BILLION / CUDA
CORES: 3,584 / CORE/BOOST CLOCK: 1481 MHZ / 1582 MHZ / MEMORY:
11GB GDDR5X / DISPLAY CONNECTORS: DISPLAY PORT 1.4, HDMI 2.0(B)GPU95 %
2
OVERCLOCKING PROWESS
We took a retail sample all the way up
to 2.0GHz core clock and 12Gbps memory
bandwidth with ease, boosting performance
by near 15%.1
DIAMOND COOLER
Nvidia’s 10 series cards look good and
are a fantastic cooling solution. The blower
design excels in small form factor cases, and
those lacking suitable internal airflow.
4
1440P & 4K KING
Whether you game at high refresh rates
at 1440p, or just 4K, this card is the king.
We’re curious to see what’ll happen when we
put two of these beauties together...3
GOOD VALUE?
Although Nvidia has been charging us
near £700 for the past year for the GTX 1080,
and £1,200 for the Titan, it still doesn’t feel
like we’re being short changed with this card.
Hardware
REVIEWS