NVIDIA ups the power and drops the price with its impressive new graphics cards

While you were out enjoying your Friday night, NVIDIA kicked off the weekend with a surprise unveil at the DreamHack gaming event in Austin to debut its latest gaming GPUs.

CEO Jen-Hsun Huang took to the stage at the city’s Emo’s music venue to showcase the GeForce GTX 1080, the company’s first Pascal-based GPU, which promises double the performance and three times the power efficiency of its current top dog, the Titan X.

Oh, and it’s about $400 less expensive than that $1,000 card.

Huang called the new card “insane,” adding that the performance was “almost irresponsible,” perhaps referring, in part, to the “several billion dollar,” two-year research and development process he says went into the project.

Due May 27, the GTX 1080 packs nine teraflops of computational power and 8GB of GDDR5X memory. According to NVIDIA’s numbers, the card’s Boost clock is capable of over 1700MHz, but an Unreal Engine 4 demo at the event pushed it over 2000MHz.

The system is designed to meet the increasing needs of multi-monitor ultra high-def gaming and virtual reality systems, boosting the power while dropping the entry price.

Speaking of which, the company also made mention of the even more affordable GTX 1070 which is set to run $379 when it arrives on June 10. That cheaper unit still outpaces the Titan, with 6.5 teraflops and 8GB of GDDR5 RAM.