The smoke around Nvidia's purported GeForce GTX 1070 Ti has become too thick to ignore of late. We've seen full specs of the card leak over the past few weeks, and a prematurely-posted product page from board partner KFA2 (spotted by the folks at Hexus, and now removed) has more or less confirmed that such a card is coming. We don't know exactly when such a product might arrive yet, but that's not stopping me from pulling out my top-secret Excel spreadsheet and making some predictions about where a presumable GTX 1070 Ti will sit in today's graphics-card pantheon. I've done it before, and my predictions turned out to be dead-on, so hey. Let's do it again.

GPU base clock (MHz) GPU boost clock (MHz) ROP pixels/ clock Texels filtered/ clock Shader pro- cessors Memory path (bits) Memory bandwidth Memory size Peak power draw RX 580 1257 1340 32 144 2304 256 256 GB/s 8 GB 185 W GTX 1060 6GB 1506 1708 48 80 1152 192 192 GB/s 6 GB 120 W GTX 1070 1506 1683 64 120 1920 256 256 GB/s 8 GB 150 W RX Vega 56 1156 1471 64 224 3584 2048 410 GB/s 8 GB 210 W GTX 1070 Ti? 1607? 1683? 64? 152? 2432? 256? 256 GB/s? 8 GB? 180 W? RX Vega 64 1274 1546 64 256 4096 2048 484 GB/s 8 GB 295 W GTX 1080 1607 1733 64 160 2560 256 320 GB/s 8 GB 180 W GTX 1080 Ti 1480 1582 64 224 3584 352 484 11 GB 250 W Titan Xp 1405 1585 96 240 3840 384 547 GB/s 12 GB 250 W

Courtesy of the team at Tech ARP (via Hexus), we have a list of specs that was apparently confirmed by the product page posted by KFA2. The GTX 1070 Ti will almost certainly use a less-neutered version of the GP104 GPU that underpins the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080.

A block diagram of a possible GP104 GPU for the GTX 1070 Ti

Of the 20 Pascal streaming multiprocessors on board GP104, the GTX 1070 Ti will purportedly have 19 of them active, for a total of 2432 shader processors, 152 texture units, and 64 ROPs. Those figures are only slightly behind the resources of the GTX 1080's, so the GTX 1070 Ti might sit uncomfortably close to that card in Nvidia's product stack (at least reference clock for reference clock). We'll see just how close in a moment.

A potential KFA2 GTX 1070 Ti. Source: KFA2

The biggest difference between the GTX 1070 Ti and GTX 1080 will apparently be in the lesser card's memory subsystem. Where the GTX 1080 uses 8 GB of GDDR5X RAM clocked at 10 GT/s or 11 GT/s, the hypothetical GTX 1070 Ti might stick with 8 GB of GDDR5 RAM running at 8 GT/s. That means the pumped-up GTX 1070 could offer just 256 GB/s of memory bandwidth, down substantially from the GTX 1080's 320 GB/s at reference speeds.

Peak pixel fill rate (Gpixels/s) Peak bilinear filtering int8/fp16 (Gtexels/s) Peak rasterization rate (Gtris/s) Peak FP32 shader arithmetic rate (tflops) Radeon RX 580 43 193/96 5.4 6.2 GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 82 137/137 3.4 4.4 GeForce GTX 1070 108 202/202 5 7 Radeon RX Vega 56 94 330/165 5.9 10.2 GeForce GTX 1070 Ti? 108? 256/256? 6.7? 8.2? Radeon RX Vega 64 99 396/198 6.2 12.7 GeForce GTX 1080 111 277/277 6.9 8.9 GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 139 354/354 9.5 11.3 Nvidia Titan Xp 152 380/380 9.5 11.3

The beefed-up GTX 1070 Ti doesn't gain any extra pixel fill rate compared to its less-shiny forebear, but its peak texturing and compute capabilities make it a better match for the RX Vega 56. The green team doesn't seem willing to let its competitor hold even a dead heat in the graphics-card horse race, it seems. It'll remain to be seen how Nvidia manages to keep the GTX 1070 Ti from cannibalizing GTX 1080 sales, though, given how closely-matched the cards are in almost every measure of theoretical performance we can bring to bear.

A potential bare GTX 1070 Ti board. Source: KFA2

Some rumors suggest that all GTX 1070 Ti cards will be locked to the same frequencies, though those rumors really don't make a ton of sense given that GPU Boost 3.0 is a thing. Maybe Nvidia intends to limit the headroom of that dynamic clock scheme on the GTX 1070 Ti. We won't know for sure until official details emerge.