“Are you ready?” NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang asked the heaving crowd, with a grin.

And boy, were they ever.

Hundreds of gamers whooped encouragement as Jen-Hsun unveiled Tuesday night the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti — the fastest gaming GPU ever.

Speaking at the Game Developers Conference, in San Francisco, Jen-Hsun crowned our award-winning lineup of Pascal architecture-based GPUs with a new king.

The Ultimate GeForce

“It’s time for something new, something that’s 35 percent faster than a GTX 1080, something that’s faster than TITAN X. Let’s call it the ultimate GeForce,” said Jen-Hsun, wearing his trademark black leather jacket. He was speaking to a crowd of more than 500 gamers and international journalists at the Regency Ballroom, a legendary venue used more for rock concerts than tech announcements.

Jen-Hsun then rolled a video — detailing the specs — and the audience was floored. GTX 1080 Ti is manufactured on the industry’s cutting-edge FinFET process. Its 12 billion transistors deliver a dramatic increase in performance and efficiency, and it bristles with 3,584 NVIDIA CUDA cores and a massive 11GB frame buffer running at an unheard of 11Gbps.

Why so powerful?

Well, PC gaming is thriving like never before, and games — and gamers — are demanding more performance than ever.

“Year after year after year, video games are getting more and more beautiful, so we’re introducing the next-generation high end so you’re ready to enjoy next-generation games,” Jen-Hsun said.

“Oh YEAAAAAAH,” one gamer roared in response.

First 4K VR-Ready GPU

NVIDIA designed the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti to handle the graphical demands of 4K gaming and deliver unrivaled VR experiences, Jen-Hsun told the crowd.

And the GTX 1080 Ti runs as cool as it looks. That’s thanks to superior heat dissipation from a new high-airflow thermal solution with vapor chamber cooling, 2x the airflow area and a power architecture featuring a seven-phase power design with 14 high-efficiency dualFETs.

No surprise, then, that GTX 1080 Ti includes support for advanced graphics technologies, such as 4K, VR, NVIDIA G-SYNC HDR and NVIDIA GameWorks for interactive, cinematic experiences accompanied by incredibly smooth gameplay.

To show what GTX 1080 Ti makes possible, Jen-Hsun showed off Epic Games’ Paragon next-gen character models with astonishing levels of realism — lifelike hair and skin, richly detailed clothing and armor. Light glinting dramatically from every detail.

Audience members gasped when Jen-Hsun revealed they were all rendered on our GTX 1080 Ti running at more than 2 GHz, and a temperature of just 66 degrees centigrade, an unprecedented feat.

“This is the way computer graphics should be,” Jen-Hsun said.

“Coming out of the box, the stock out of the box 1080 Ti is 35 percent faster than a 1080, faster than a TITAN X,” Jen-Hsun said to raucous hoots from the crowd. “… and all of that for $699.”

“Take my money,” one gamer hollered.

“Don’t throw your wallets up here yet,” Jen-Hsun responded.

“And even better news: it’s coming next week. In fact, ladies and gentlemen, we’re in full production with 1080 Ti, and it’s all around you right now,” he continued.

And with that, curtains were dropped all around the room and dozens of PCs loaded with the new GTX 1080 Ti — and the latest games — were unveiled. Jen-Hsun invited audience members to try it out for themselves, thanked the audience and walked off the stage.

Talk about a mic drop.

GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards, including the NVIDIA Founders Edition, will be available worldwide on March 10, from NVIDIA GeForce partners, including ASUS, Colorful, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Innovision 3D, MSI, Palit, PNY and Zotac.

Pre-orders on nvidia.com will go live on March 2, at 8am Pacific.

For more, visit GeForce.com.