Nvidia have announced their new Pascal architecture and 16 nm GPUs with a bang – massive GP100 GPU paired with high bandwidth 16 GB HBM2 memory. However, at the moment, GP100 is only present in Tesla compute cards. For gaming, Nvidia have just announced new cards based on smaller chip (likely called GP104) – GTX 1080 and GTX 1070.

GeForce GTX 1080 is the new gaming flagship. Its 7.2 billion transistor GPU has 2560 CUDA cores, clocked at impressive 1607 MHz with boost up to 1733 MHz. Nvidia claims that card should overclock well and reach clocks over 2000 MHz. The card has 8 GB of GDDR5X VRAM, connected via 256 bit bus, providing 320 GB/s bandwidth. GDDR5X is the newer version of GDDR5, offering a considerable increase in bandwidth. Card’s TDP is 180 W. Nvidia claims that GTX 1080 should provide 9 TFLOPS of FP32 performance, which looks respectable, compared to 5.6 TFLOPS of 980 Ti and 6.1 TFLOPS of Titan X. While older Maxwell cards have more cores and slightly higher bandwidth, it seems likely that new architecture and higher clocks can easily offset these differences. There was little information on GTX 1070 with no detailed information about the differences in GPU configuration. GTX 1070 will have 8 GB of older GDDR5 VRAM (256 GB/s) and should offer the performance of 6.5 TFLOPS.

In terms of features, new GTX 10xx cards support DirectX 12 (feature level FL12_1) and Vulkan. There are HDMI 2.0B outputs for 4K at 60 Hz and DisplayPort 1.4 supporting 4K at 120 Hz. Externally, reference cards look like a more angled and “polygonal” version of Nvidia’s previous designs. This time, Nvidia have decided to call reference designs “Founders Editions” and sell them directly at a higher price. There are some rumours that these versions have higher binned and overclocked GPUs, but that is not certain at the moment.

While there is a decent raw performance increase, Nvidia have added some additional features to improve multi-monitor, curved monitor image quality and VR performance. Lens Matched Shading is an improved version of Maxwell’s Multi-Res Shading. It uses the information about the VR displays to avoid doing high resolution shading calculations in areas where VR display has low resolution anyway. Another interesting new feature is Simultaneous Multi-Projection, which allows the rendering of multiple geometry viewpoints in a single pass. It can be used to render a more correct image for angled multi-monitor setups and curved displays. When used for the overlapping VR viewpoints, it can calculate geometry for both viewpoints once, reducing overhead. Overall, these additions sound very promising.

Nvidia’s interest in VR is not limited to the new hardware features, they are also offering VRworks for developers to improve VR experience. Existing Gameworks features are part of the package to improve in-game physics and provide particle effects. There is also sound modelling, providing proper sound propagation in the VR world to match the scene. Owners of HTC Vive will be able to try these features in Nvidia’s VR Funhouse.

While it is nice to see all these features from a technical side, the proliferation of vendor exclusive features is somewhat worrying. With just two GPU manufacturers and two headset manufacturers, there is already a chance of different games providing proper VR experience with only one of four possible combinations.

Finally, there is a new feature that supports older cards starting from GTX 600 and which will make K-putt happy. Ansel provides advanced tools for taking high quality in-game screenshots. With it, you can freely change your viewpoint, take screenshots at 32x higher resolution than the one you play at, capture HDR, 360 degree images. There are also filters if you like using them, the only catch is that game developers have to integrate Ansel support into their games.

GeForce GTX 1080 will be available on May 27th for $599, while GTX 1070 launches on June 10th for $379. Nvidia only guarantees that more expensive Founders Edition cards ($699 and $449 respectively) will be available for purchase at these dates. Non reference cards may launch later. Now, it is time to wait for the independent reviews to see how these cards really perform. It is also a good idea to see what AMD releases this year to get the best deal.