NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition Review - PAGE 1

The wait is finally over and the new consumer oriented Pascal cards from NVIDIA are imminent. During the public launch event that took place in Austin, Texas, earlier this month, NVIDIA's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. These two cards are equipped with the latest Pascal architecture and promise a "quantum leap" in performance compared to previous generation video cards.

Today however the focus will be on the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080; precisely the "Founders Edition" which is basically the new nomenclature for what we previously called "NVIDIA Reference" cards. The Founders Edition concept caused a lot of confusion even during the reveal event, mostly due to the announcement of two different pricing tiers: $599 for the GTX 1080 and $699 for the GTX 1080 Founders Edition. It is however a pretty simple concept: the GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition is a card designed, built, and sold by NVIDIA. The Founders Edition "was crafted by NVIDIA engineers with premium materials and components, including a die cast aluminum body and low-profile backplate, all machine finished and heat treated for strength and rigidity. The thermal solution was designed to maintain consistent performance even in the most thermally challenging environments, including multi-GPU setups and small form factor chassis. Built around a radial fan with advanced vapor chamber cooling, the GTX 1080 Founders Edition moves all heated air outside the chassis. A metal baseplate on top of low profile components provides clean air channels for the best thermal performance and acoustics".

On top of the eye candy and structural improvements, NVIDIA also made sure that the GTX 1080 Founders Edition "was designed with a low impedance power delivery network, custom voltage regulators and a 5phase dual-FET power supply optimized for clean power delivery". As a result, the GTX 1080 Founders Edition is extremely efficient and runs very stable even with high overclocking. NVIDIA clarified that this card does not come with hand-picked chips, binned memory, or factory overclock. It's a GTX 1080 made to the rigorous standards of NVIDIA for users that want the "reference" look, and it will always be available for purchase even towards the product's end of life cycle. The price premium is probably in place to avoid any conflicts between the Founders Edition cards and products offered by NVIDIA's board partners down the road. All variants of the GTX 1080 should be readily available on May 27, 2016.

Now that we know exactly what we are dealing with, let's take a look at the Pascal architecture and the GP104 GPU at the heart of the GeForce GTX 1080. The GP104 GPU is made using a new 16 nm FinFET manufacturing process, which allowed NVIDIA to cram a ridiculous 7.2 billion transistors into the chip. The new fabrication process seems to have allowed for improved power efficiency, higher performance levels, and new GPU features. Looking closer, the Pascal GP104 is composed of four Graphics Processing Clusters, twenty Pascal Streaming Multiprocessors, and eight memory controllers. Each Graphics Processing Clusters comes with a dedicated raster engine and five Streaming Multiprocessors. The 20 Streaming Multiprocessors account for 128 CUDA cores each for a total of 2560.
In terms of memory, the GTX 1080 comes with 8192MB of GDDR5X RAM running on a 256-bit interface for a total 320 GB/s bandwidth and an impressive 10 Gbps memory data rate. To achieve such speed of operation, a new GPU circuit architecture and board channel paths were designed from the ground up.
The combination of the new Pascal architecture, GDDR5X memory, a significantly enhanced delta color compression capability, and a myriad of other innovations makes the GTX 1080 a better performer than its predecessor, the GTX 980. On paper, we are promised 1.7x the performance of a GTX 980 in gaming and almost triple the performance in VR!

Specifications:

Information courtesy of NVIDIA