It’s about time we share first benchmarks of GeForce GTX 1080, new flagship graphics card that will be unveiled tomorrow by NVIDIA.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080, 8GB RAM GDDR5X at 10 GHz

I think the most interesting detail about GTX 1080 is the new memory. NVIDIA has finally used 8GB ram for its flagship card. It’s no longer an exclusive to mobile solutions. Additionally, the GDDR5X modules are clocked at 2500 MHz (which is shown as 5000+ MHz in 3DMark). However the effective clock is 10000 MHz, which means the bandwidth is somewhere around 320 GB/s (assuming it’s 256-bit wide).

On the GPU side we have a huge improvement in terms of frequencies. It is said that GTX 1080 can boost up to 1.8 GHz, with base clock around 1.6 GHz. At the time of writing we are not able to confirm the exact reference clock. For such reason I decided to avoid making comparison charts, so this post will essentially tell you what GTX 1080 is capable of and nothing more.

NVIDIA Pascal Series (To be confirmed) May 5th 2016 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU 16nm FF GP104-400 16nm FF GP104-200 16nm FF GP100-890 CUDA Cores ? ? 3584 Memory Type 8GB GDDR5X 8GB GDDR5 16 GB HBM2 Base Clock ? ? 1328 MHz Memory Clock 2500 MHz 2000 MHz 352 MHz Effective Memory Clock 10000 MHz 8000 MHz 1408 MHz Memory Bus 256-bit 256-bit 4096-bit Memory Bandwidth 320 GB/s 256 GB/s 720 GB/s

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 8GB — 3DMark11 Performance

Like always, we are only looking at graphics score. 3DMark11 Performance preset is rendered at 1280×720 resolution. GeForce GTX 1080 scores 27683 points, which is still above overclocked GM200 cards (~23-25k). Worth noting 3DMark11 is not showing correct GPU clocks, however the new driver already supports GTX 1080 by its name.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 8GB — 3DMark FireStrike Extreme

The second benchmark we have is from FireStrike Extreme, which as you probably already know is rendered at 2560×1440 resolution. This is actually the first benchmark where you will see 1.860 GHz clock. In this scenario GTX 1080 is faster than typical overclocked GTX 980 Ti (~8700 points). However if we compare it GTX 980 Ti running at almost the same frequency (1.8GHz with LN2 cooling), GTX 1080 is actually much slower clock to clock (link).

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080

Benefit of using higher frequencies will definitely make GTX 1080 faster than most high-end cards out of the box. However is this a better product in all scenarios? Will be just as fast in games? How does it perform at 4K? Will VR performance be satisfying? Well, we don’t have answers to these questions yet, but we will keep digging.