Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition Graphic Card Review

Disclosure: The GeForce GTX 1080 review unit is provided by Nvidia

I finally got my hands on the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition graphic card. The first of the Pascal gaming-grade graphic card.

Nvidia pulled a big show to build a very strong hype around the card at an event in Austin Texas. Many were flown in by Nvidia to write or make videos about the event and what they did before the event (horsey ride, yay!!!). It was good enough to overwhelm, confuse or intimidate even the most experienced of reviewers and make their jaws drop, literally. In that environment, who wouldn’t be? Judging by multiple videos I’ve seen from multiple vloggers is that the only thing  probably missing is to make the GTX 1080 take ‘the long walk’ with six armed policemen with Bill Goldberg’s entrance.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang talked about its first gaming-grade Pascal card with a promise of delivering two times the performance and three times the efficiency of Titan X. In all fairness, a comparison with the GTX 980 and GTX 980Ti would have made a lot more sense to have a balanced perspective. There’s no better feeling than showing significant enough changes compared to its predecessor.

And that’s how review sites started making a new punchline- “Hail the new king! GTX 1080”. Which would be a bit awkward when the alleged GTX 1080Ti will come out and becomes the new king. While certain parts of the gaming community may not be able to buy the GTX 1080 while its hot for the insane pricing at the time of launch, the details of which is what keeps it promising enough to see what’s new. In a time where easily-and-properly accessible curved widescreen displays or 4K displays with higher-than-60Hz is available, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 is a new card that comes with a promise to keep with all of those options- and Virtual Reality.

This card also introduces 8K resolution support, Micron GDDR5X memory and the first based on 16nm FinFET process. What really got my attention was the lack of information along with an operating temperature of 67 degrees Celcius on a GTX 1080 which was running at more than 2000 MHz. Actual frequency, setup and ambient temperatures are some of the important influential factors.

The GP104-based Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 has more CUDA cores compared to GTX 980 (2560 Vs. 2048), more texture fill rate (257 GT/s Vs. 172 GT/s) and boosted memory clock thanks to GDDR5X (10 Gbps Vs. 7 Gbps) and 2GB more. But what’s interesting is that memory interface (256-bit Vs. 384-bit) and memory bandwidth is lesser (320 GB/s Vs. 336.5 GB/s). Differences don’t matter as long as the end result means a justifiable performance boost over the GTX 980 and the GTX 980Ti,  the previous generation DX12 cards.

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These are paper spec comparison:

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