GTX 1080 unveiled; 9 teraflops

[JEMC]

KaosMike said:

Finally, the first 'card' has been played by Nvidia. Going to be really exciting to see AMD's comparison in a month or two.

I have a few takeaways.

1. The price points seem kind of good for a new tech and given where the per/watt is, which leads me to believe they know that AMD's Polaris may overtake them in this round and they are pricing appropriately. Otherwise these things would be sitting at $699 and up. Nvidia also realized that it was a good business to cannibalize the cooler market and take the profit for themselves like AMD did, could be wrong but it seems like a new approach.

1a. The reason they showed off an OC'd version sort of supports this

2. Going to be interesting to see the difference between TMSC 16nm vs GloFo 14nm on top of the redesigned architectures.

3. My take is that the whole Polaris line will be HBM1 except for the bottom

4. My other thought is that the current mid to high end cards and below will drop in price precipitously because of the generational leap, which will allow a resurgence/big upgrade cycle to PC gaming scene in the 290x-390x space.  Feels like we've been stuck on 28nm for a decade.

5. Async compute seemed like a big Achilles heel in dx12 vs AMD, so no longer the case in this gen.

Unfortunately, AMD themselves has said that they aren't targeting the high end market with their upcoming Polaris cards. The 1080 doesn't have competition and the only reason it has that price, it to leave room for the future 1080Ti (whenever it's released).

And no, none of the upcoming Polaris cards will have HBM. The high end Polaris 10 is rumored to have GDDR5X, like the GTX 1080, while the rest will have GDDR5.