It's a tough call. I see my 780 classified at about $240 on eBay. Maybe I can make a quick sell of it at $200 but even then I'd be out a card for more than a month. If I wait a month to sell I might get $140 but at least I could keep playing games. Some are also speculating that only the Founder Version will be available at first so it might even be several months before a regular versions are available. 1070 is what I like at a price I'm willing to pay but I'm also still curious about Polaris. If it's significantly cheaper it could be a good stop gap for Vega and Tesla which are probably only another 6 months out and will be faster than Pascal.
Kind of funny that they're using '1080' for a card that people would buy wanting to play 4K resolution.
After a rehash of the conference it became clear that Nvidia may have been a little unclear on some of their statements. When Jen-Hsun said the 1080 was twice as powerful as the Titan X he was referring to VR games. In regular games it's supposed to be faster than 980 SLi which is only about 25% - 30% faster than a stock 980Ti, or about 5% to 15% faster than the average OC 980Ti. Also it's not really clear when he said the 1070 was faster than a single 980Ti if he was also referring to VR games or regular games. This is leading people to wonder if it is or isn't faster than a 980Ti. Also the only thing Jen-Hsun said about the founders edition was that it was for extreme overclocking. However Nvidia contradicted that after the conference. Apparently it's just their fancy way of saying reference card and there is nothing special about it other than that will be the only card available at launch. Which means we may not see the lower priced cards until later on. If you want a 1080 or 1070 on day 1 it's $699 and $449. http://www.gamersnexus.net/news-pc/2427-difference-between-gtx-1080-founders-edition-and-reference
The lower priced cards are the ones the manufacturer's get no? So for example, the non founders 1080 that Gigabyte will ship could be just be minimum $599 but most likely more than that but less than the founders 1080.
From what I've read the $599 would be the base price and vendors can't go lower. Aside from that the vendors can control their own prices as usual. They can go higher than $599 or even $699 if they want. So EVGA might have their reference blower for $600, but then also have a Gaming, SC+, Classified, FTW, Hydro, and Kingpin at various prices over $600 or even $700. A hydro with water block might go for $800. There is still some speculation of a GDDR5x shortage so supply could be low. My bet is well see nothing but Founders edition at $699 for two weeks and then slowly other Vendors will come in with custom coolers and prices. If it's anything like the 980ti they will be very few stock speed cards other then the reference that came out so the $599 price might be elusive. The NDA for the 1080 ends on May 17th so that's when we'll see some real reviews.
Ars throws a wee bit of shade on the 1080... http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/05/nvidia-gtx-1080-review/
Some people are disappointed and they have some good points. The 1080 is not a replacement for the 980ti. It's the replacement for the 980 and at $700 ($600 + $100 founders tax) it's the most expensive X80 launch yet. 580 ($500), 680 ($500), 780 ($650), 980 ($550). The new bridge for Sli must be bought separately for ~$50 and it comes in 3 fixed sizes so people might need more than 1. The new connector only supports dual SLi so those super enthusiast might have to keep their 4xTitan setups for record benchmarks. Nvidia says you can use the old cable connector type for 4xSLi but you have to call them to get a code to unlock it. That's weird. My guess its it's some kind of late response to peoples' reaction to the 2xSLi limit. Despite the impressive 25% performance gains it's still not the 4k slayer many had hoped for. Overall I think it's a great card that will go unchallenged for a long time but it's more than I'm willing to spend on a GPU. I also think we can expect a much faster 1080ti bomb when AMD launches it's high end cards later this year. Here are several games at 4k. All are very playable with the 1080 but still < 60fps.
The pricing is getting ridiculous. I miss the days when you could get cards that would give you most of the perfomance of the high end cards for $200-300, like the 8800GT, Radeon 4870, or GTX 460. Unless we see some fierce competition from AMD, those prices aren't going to happen again. $700 is a lot more than I want to spend on a video card that will be obsolete and lose half of its value in a year or two.
I think the 1080 is not horribly priced considering where the market is sitting right now. 4k still has a ways to go before it dominates a majority of households. for me, 1440p performance is what I focus on. if you look at it from a 1080p perspective where a majority of the consumers are at, this card is super overkill. a geforce 970 is still plenty good for that category. the sli bridge decision is nuts though. no defending that.
The 1070 should be a better value card but the specs were also reveled today and it's heavily cut. If it's 75% of the 1080 it should match the performance of a stock 980ti but I have my doubts it will match it OC to OC. 1070 is going to be chocked by it's lower memory bandwidth. I'm still rooting for Polaris but if it doesn't perform and if I can find a 1070 in July at $380 it might be my next card. This right here sums up why I might choose AMD over Nvidia if the cards have similar performance. Either intentionally or unintentionally the Kepler series has gone obsolete through drivers. Read more: http://wccftech.com/nvidia-amd-tested-cry-primal-radeons-lead-pack/#ixzz48w39mg00 http://wccftech.com/nvidia-amd-tested-cry-primal-radeons-lead-pack/
That's another thing nvidia does when they have no competition: they start gimping their slightly older cards with intentionally bad drivers. I expect the 970 and 980 cards will be getting gimped soon. Or you can go with AMD and get drivers that are terrible right from the start and maybe get updated once every six months.
True. According to Steam 37% of people still game at 1080P and 50% still use a dual core. For those people anything over 970 is a waste.
And 26% are still at ~720p (1366 x 768). The overwhelming majority are at 720p, 1080p, or somewhere in between, and probably don't need anything faster right now than a 970. Only about 5% of people on the hardware survey are running at a resolution above 1080p. 1440p is only at 1.5% and 1200p is only at 1.4%. The market that even needs a card like this seems like it's very small.
The whole Founders Edition has been a bit of a mess. At first no one seemed to know what it was. Then some of the media were told it was the reference card and would be released before the board partners cards. Now HardOCP is saying Nvidia told them yesterday the FE would release at the same time as other board partners products on the 27th. If that's the case I'm not sure who would choose the reference card with a blower and a $100 premium.
The specs for the 1070 are out and some people are a little disappointed. If you think the X70 version should be a sister card to the X80 then the 1070 really should be called a 1060Ti. It's missing 33% of the 1080 processor and using a different type of memory which is 25% slower with 25% less bandwidth. I compared all previous cards and the only pair that had a bigger performance gap were the 770 and 780 but the 770 was actually clocked much higher in both memory and GPU so in the end the performance difference may not have been as much. Of course in the end I think it's all about price vs performance so I'll wait to see benchmarks before I pass judgement. GPU: Cores / Clock reduction 1080->1070: -33%/-8.3% 980->970: -23%/-7.9% 780->770: -50%/+20.2% 680->670: -14.2%/-7.2% 580->570: -6.6%/-5.4% 480->470: -7.1%/-15.3% Memory: Bandwidth / Clock reduction 1080->1070: -25%/-25% 980->970: -14%/-0% 780->770: -50%/+16.6 680->670: 0%/0% 580->570: -20%/-5.4% 480->470: -20%/-10.4 And here is Nvidia explaining the Founders Edition. In summary they aren't competing with their board partners. They are only offering a similar product for a similar price to customers that want to buy it. Clear as mud. The only thing that makes any sense is when he says no one would have cared if they'd launched it after the release date and that is probably right.
Based on the specs, I'm guessing this will have performance similar to or maybe slightly faster than the vanilla 980. I doubt it will match the 980 Ti or Titan X. It has fewer CUDA cores than a 980, but a more efficient architecture, and slightly faster memory. If it's priced appropriately, it could be compelling for people upgrading from GTX 700 series and older cards. I actually feel a little relieved about where I stand with my vanilla 980. The 1080 is about $200 too expensive at $700 for me to ever consider. And this card isn't looking like a compelling upgrade if you have a 970, 980, or 980 Ti. But I guess we need to wait and see how it actually benchmarks.
So far it seems that the OC of 2.114GHz shown in the Nvidia demo hasn't been sustainable by the reviewers. Nvidia also showed the temperature during the OC at 67 but no one else has been able to get temps under 80 at those speeds. Nvidia has stated that the card they used was not specially selected. My guess is they had some AC blasting cold air into the case. Here we see an OC on a Founders Edition gaming at about 2.1 GHz (18%) then after two minutes it's at 2GHz (15%) and then after 10+ minutes it's back to stock speeds. (0%). During the throttling process there are artifacts and black screens. The results show that the founders edition with blower pretty much just sucks at OCing. The blue line in the graph is where the reviewer hacked an EVGA water hybrid cooler onto the 1080 and was able to sustain the OC speeds that Nvidia showed during the demo. He was never able to get much higher without crashing.
More bad throttling numbers with the FE cooler. Looks like about a 17% frequency drop after 20 minutes in the case. That almost drops it to a high-end 980ti performance. Makes me wonder what a better cooler will be like. The FE blower is at least blowing out of the case. A twin fan solution will keep all the heat in the case. Looks like the temp limit can be raised from 83 to 92 to get clocks up. http://www.computerbase.de/2016-05/geforce-gtx-1080-test/6/