Nvidia unveiled its new flagship GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, promising 35 percent faster performance than the GTX 1080 ($549.00 at NVIDIA) .

That performance boost is thanks to a combination of hardware and software improvements. On the hardware side, the Pascal-based GTX 1080 Ti boasts 11GB of GDDR5X memory and an 11Gbps data rate. Nvidia also designed a new thermal vapor cooling system to dissipate heat from the card, which results in twice the airflow of the GTX 1080.

On the software side, the GTX 1080 Ti has two virtual crutches to help increase the processor's bandwidth: tiled caching and compression. Together, they double the video card's raw bandwidth, although it's worth noting that neither approach is new to the Pascal architecture: Nvidia's older Maxwell-based chips also use tiled caches to improve performance, for instance.

The PC gamers for whom this card is designed will necessarily want to know what a 35 percent performance boost translates to in terms of visuals. At a press event on Tuesday night, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang (pictured above) offered a pre-recorded demo that showed a silky-smooth rendering of a camera panning around a sample video game character. It looked great, although Huang didn't offer the same demo run on the GTX 1080 for comparison.

And although much was made of the GTX 1080 Ti's 35 percent performance boost over the GTX 1080, Huang also briefly mentioned that the new card is also faster than the GeForce Titan X, a $1,200 GPU that is aimed both at hardcore gamers and artificial intelligence researchers in need of immense processing power. (It's worth noting that the GTX 1080 is also faster and cheaper than the Titan X, so the Ti is simply continuing a trend). Huang called the Titan X "relatively hard to buy," and seemed to suggest the GTX 1080 Ti as a worthy alternative.

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Speaking of buying, you'll be able to put the $699 GTX 1080 Ti in an online shopping card starting March 10. Nvidia will also start taking pre-orders on Thursday. The cards will be marketed by the usual gaggle of Nvidia partners, including Asus, EVGA, MSY, and Zotac. As with other cards, there will also be an Nvidia-branded Founders Edition version.

Nvidia also announced that the GTX 1080 will get a $100 price drop to $499, sure to attract gamers who don't need the Ti's performance boost and are hoping to trade that flexibility for a discount.

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