After letting us ruminate on the sheer speed of its new graphics card champion, the GeForce GTX 1080, Nvidia has given us mortals a look at its next graphics card: the GeForce GTX 1070. The 1070 is $379, compared to the 1080's $599 price tag, and that discount applies to almost every aspect of the card. The clock speed is a little lower, there are fewer CUDA cores and texture units, and the memory is slower — 8Gbps GDDR5 instead of 10Gbps GDDR5X. Even the power demands are lower, though at least Nvidia put in the same 8GB quantity of VRAM.

You pay a premium for the top of the line, and by being one notch lower the 1070 might be the sweet spot. Unless you have an underutilized 4K monitor on your desk, or until game demands catch up, the GTX 1080 is probably overkill for most people; the GTX 1070 might be precisely "kill." It should be available in a couple weeks.