GTX 1080 Ti Review: The New 4K King?
Earlier this month, NVIDIA pleasantly surprised the world with its flagship GTX 1000 series card, the GTX 1080Ti. It has been over 10 months since the last GTX 1080 Founders Edition stole the market from the last gen GTX 980Ti or the AMD R9 Fury X, and NVIDIA has just released the GTX 1080Ti in time for people to pair it with an AMD Ryzen or an Intel i7-7700K to run graphical tasks at the highest setting.
The GTX 1080Ti review here takes a look at its direct competitor, NVIDIA's in-house Titan X Pascal, or the Titan XP as it is lovingly called. For starters, the GTX 1080Ti is priced a lot lesser than the Titan X, at only $699. The GTX 1080Ti is also based on the Pascal architecture and has a massive 11GB DDR5X memory with a speed of 11GB/s. The boost clock is at a desperately high 1582 MHz with the memory clock being 5505 MHz.
In comparison, the Titan X Pascal has 12GB of memory, a 5000 MHz memory clock and a 384-bit bus width giving it a throughput of 480GB/s. The 1080Ti has a 352-bit bus width and manages a higher throughput at 484GB/s. The Titan X Pascal gets a boost clock of 1531 Mhz.
Both the cards have the same number of CUDA cores and have the same number of transistors, which means that other than gaming, scalable graphical tasks like editing and content creation would be equivalent. Aside from the technical jargon, what does all of this mean to the average gamer?
For starters, the GTX 1080Ti takes 4K gaming and makes it even better than the GTX 1080 or the Titan X Pascal. What this means is that 4K gaming is now done at acceptable framerates with some titles hitting as much as an average of more than 60 FPS with the exclusion being Crysis 3 which still maxes the card out at 54 FPS.
On most tests, the GTX 1080Ti was at least 22% faster on 4K than the GTX 1080. In fact, the card ran Metro: Last Light Redux benchmark at over 40 FPS, which is a massive improvement from the sub 30 FPS of the GTX 1080. Moreover, the card ran the Rise of Tomb Raider benchmark at an average of 62 FPS.
It is still unclear just how long will the GTX 1080Ti rule the 4K throne. Some experts believe that AMD Vega might dethrone it, however, AMD Vega seems to be a less powerful card than the GTX 1080Ti. As of now, gamers are enthralled with the card.
