Nvidia Officially Unveiled GTX 1080 Ti for $699 at GDC 2017, Featuring 11GB VRAM

Nvidia has announced its monster graphics card: the $699 GeForce GTX 1080 Ti at GDC 2017. The long-expected GeForce GTX 1080 Ti video card is a follow-up to the GTX 1080 and Titan X Pascal.

At GDC 2017, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang unveiled the GTX 1080 Ti, which promises "35 percent more performance." The Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti features 11GB of GDDR5X memory. Nvidia also claims that this new card is faster than its $1,200 Titan X, which was launched late last year for professionals. At the same time, Nvidia also announced 1080 is getting a price cut and will now start at $500, as reported by Engadget.

The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti - faster than TITAN X - will be $699 and available next week. #UltimateGeForce pic.twitter.com/aW6XIv0Cyv

— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) March 1, 2017

Nvidia claims that this latest graphics card shows the biggest jump in performance for a Ti-branded card. The earlier GTX 780 to GTX 780 Ti and GTX 980 to GTX 980 Ti saw an estimated improvement of 18 percent and 25 percent, respectively.

According to GameSpot, Nvidia says that temperatures will also see an important improvement by staying five degrees celsius cooler under the same noise levels as its non-Ti counterpart in the latest graphic card. For instance, if both cards are operating at the same temperature, the 1080 Ti will be 2.5 decibels quieter.

The board itself will consist of 12 billion transistors, 3584 CUDA cores, 28 geometry units, 224 texture units, 28 streaming multiprocessors (SMs); 128 cores each, and will use a 352-bit GDDR5x memory interface. The Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti is based on the current Pascal architecture and is equipped with 11 GB of VRAM and a stock core clock of 1583 MHz. However, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has shown the card running overclocked a little above 2000 MHz core clock speed during a stage demo, while staying around 66 degrees celsius on a stock cooler under load.

According to ArsTechnica, the key difference over the Titan X is its memory configuration. The 1080 Ti features a rather odd 11GB of GDDR5X memory, which results in a 352-bit memory interface and 88 ROPs in its place of the 12GB of GDDR5X, 384-bit interface, and 96 ROPs of the Titan X.

However, the Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti's memory runs at 11GHz rather than the Titan X's 10GHz, giving the latest card slightly higher memory bandwidth at 484GB/s. The GPU boost clock is also a wee bit higher at 1.6GHz, with Nvidia promising 2GHz when overclocked. In the card, TDP is rated at 250W with power coming in via 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe connectors.

The Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti is set to launch on the week of March 6th for $699 USD, according to Nvidia GeForce official Twitter handle. During the GDC 2017 event, the standard GTX 1080 has also received a price cut and is now available for $499.

In addition to the GTX 1080 Ti announcement, Nvidia has also revealed new SKUs for the GTX 1080 and GTX 1060; both versions will feature out-of-the-box memory overclocks. The Nvidia GTX 1080 will be overclocked with 11 GB/s GDDR5x, and the GTX 1060 will be overclocked with 9 GB/s GDDR5.