Alright guys? How's it going?
A few days ago, NVIDIA held an event for the press
- the purpose of which was announcing the new Pascal GTX 1080 and 1070 graphics cards.
Now I was on vacation at the time, so I wasn't at the event
- and it seems that NVIDIA has misplaced my invite anyway.
But very much as expected, the entire internet has been ablaze and gone completely crazy over the new cards.
And normally I would start by taking a look at the cards themselves.
However in this case, I'm going to have to deal with the marketing first of all.
Now, predictably - and because of slides like this -
one or two people have e-mailed me,
left comments on previous videos, saying this is the end of AMD:
“NVIDIA is twice the performance and three times the efficiency of Titan X!
How can AMD possibly compete?”
But before all you AMD fanboys panic more,
let's not forget that Pascal was “ten times Maxwell” only a year ago!
To NVIDIA's credit, however, this was a “very rough estimate”.
More seriously, they were of course talking about a specific case - deep learning operations.
This had nothing to do with gaming.
NVIDIA isn't shy about throwing out these kind of slides anyway
- because they know that people will pick up on it and say stuff like:
“Oh my God, Pascal is ten times faster than Maxwell!”
They do this all the time.
So they went and sort-of did it again
- but the thing about graphs is:
If you look down the side and the bottom,
you can generally see what's being measured.
For example: relative VR gaming performance.
So NVIDIA is saying the GTX 1080 has twice the performance and three times the efficiency of Titan X
- when it comes to VR gaming performance.
But you may be thinking: well how different can that be from normal gaming?
And the answer is actually: quite a lot.
I don't really want to go into the VR part of it, but VR renders in a different way.
This is very cool technology, and because VR is still quite new,
there are constant new developments - from both NVIDIA and AMD.
So NVIDIA's developed something called Simultaneous Multi-Projection
and it really does VR very, very well.
The technology looks pretty cool.
I haven't had a really close look at it yet.
I'm sort-of holding off on doing the VR video because of what I just said:
It is very fluid, new technologies are constantly being developed,
and I would expect AMD to have something more in the Polaris launch as well.
Right, so moving on to the cards themselves:
We have the GTX 1080 which is the “New King”.
Coming in at 9 TFLOPS and 8GB of GDDR5X memory, $599 MSRP
- and what's this $699 “Founders Edition”?
Launching on May 27th.
Now the only card launching on May 27 is the Founders Edition
and Steve over at GamersNexus discovered that the Founders Edition is basically just the reference card.
In other words: NVIDIA have taken the reference card,
rebranded it as the Founders Edition,
and are charging $100 more.
So partner's cards will only be available later - at around the MSRP of $599.
What's this all about?
Well basically, in my last couple of episodes,
I made a pretty strong suggestion that NVIDIA would paper-launch this card.
And this is exactly what this is all about.
They have got such low quantities of the card,
the GDDR5X from Micron is only available in such low quantities,
that they're basically paper-launching this card.
And due to scarcity - and demand will be very high
- they are charging another $100 for it.
They are kind-of screwing over their partners here
as normally this is the sort of thing you would expect their partners to do.
So this one's going to be interesting to keep an eye on.
But for now, 27th of May is when the general public will be able to get hold of one
- so long as they're willing to pay.
Now looking at the 8GB of memory, the GDDR5X from Micron,
this is the slowest version of the GDDR5X.
Which, once again, just points to it being a paper launch.
This is very new memory, and most of the memory coming out will be 10Gb/s.
Basically until the technology matures more.
There is sort-of a feeling that it's being rushed out the door
but it's actually quite obvious why they've done it:
They've had to do it, because otherwise, had they not gone with GDDR5X
the card would have been hamstrung with a lack of bandwidth.
We can sort-of see this by looking at the GTX 1070 which is down at 6.5 TFLOPS
and comes with 8GB of GDDR5 - not the GDDR5X.
Now we know that this is rated at 8Gb/s, so it's quite a bit slower than the GDDR5X on the 1080.
It is, however, still the fastest GDDR5 that money can buy.
Because it's the fastest, it's also the most expensive.
And though the difference may not be that much
- on what NVIDIA will be hoping is a relatively high volume card -
it can all add up.
The reason they've gone with this is simple:
They needed the extra bandwidth.
This card is almost certainly hamstrung by bandwidth.
Given that NVIDIA claims that performance is on the level with Titan X
- yet the Titan X has 30% more memory bandwidth -
then it's pretty reasonable to suggest that the 1070 will have issues with memory bandwidth.
And as the memory is already pushed near the limit,
it may not be all that great of an overclocker.
So this could be a pretty hard limit on the performance of the 1070.
It's got a $379 MSRP and, once again, a Founders Edition costing $449.
Available on June 10th.
So, concentrating on the GTX 1080 for now:
On GeForce.com, NVIDIA is comparing it to the GeForce GTX 980.
And this is what makes sense
because, really, it's GTX 980 owners that should be thinking about the upgrade here.
It's got double the memory, and it's 10Gb/s vs. 7 Gb/s.
What is probably the most interesting thing about the new Pascal architecture though
is the clock speeds.
Now straight away I'm going to say: I have been really surprised at this
- because in my first Polaris/Pascal video, I made the suggestion
that NVIDIA probably would not see such a large increase in clockspeeds over Maxwell.
But that's clearly not been the case.
So I was way off in this case.
I've had a think about it, and I'm pretty sure I know what's happening here.
But I will talk about that later.
For now though, just looking at the boost clock,
1733 MHz of the 1080, compared to 1216MHz of the 980 - that's 43% higher boost clock.
Looking at the full specs we can see that it has 2560 CUDA cores
with a base clock of 1607 MHz and the boost clock, again, of 1733.
The GDDR5X gives it a memory bandwidth of 320GB/s.
It requires an 8-pin connector
and comes with a graphics card power of 180 watts.
So what do all these numbers really add up to?
Well it's certainly not twice Titan X
but it's still pretty fast.
Looking at the slide that actually gives away the performance of the “New King” - the GTX 1080.
Down the side here you can see the relative gaming performance,
compare it to a bunch of cards.
The interesting ones here though are the GTX 980 and the Titan X.
You can quite clearly see that it is faster than Titan X.
But just how much faster is it?
Well, I decided to stick some lines onto this
and it actually divides up pretty nicely.
If we simply divide these boxes by 5,
every red line should add another point too.
In this case the GTX 1080 should be 4.4
and down here we've got the Titan X at 3.6
with the GTX 980 down at 2.6
So if we just compare these numbers to the Titan X:
4.4 divided by 3.6 equals 22 percent faster.
If it's 22% faster than a Titan X, it's 25% faster than the 980 Ti
which is almost spot-on [with] what I said it would be
in Episodes 2, 3, and 4 of my Polaris vs. Pascal video.
So certainly no great surprises there for me at least.
Over at Linus, a few of the more recognizable tech YouTubers confirmed that it was 25% faster than the GTX 980 Ti.
There was also a video on YouTube with the 1080 running Tom Clancy's The Division
on Ultra, 4K, at 42 frames per second.
This is quite a reliable benchmark because of the resolution
and you can see here that Titan X scores 36, and the 980 Ti scores 35.
This means that the 1080 is only 17% faster than the GTX Titan X in this game.
What I said was that people with GTX 980s are more likely to be looking at this as a good upgrade.
So if we compare the 4.4 of the GTX 1080 to the 2.6 of the GTX 980
That means that the GTX 1080, by NVIDIA's own numbers, is 69% faster than the GTX 980.
Along the bottom, on the X-axis, we can see the power used.
We already know that the GTX 980 is rated at 165W.
And the GTX 1080 at 180W.
So that means that the GTX 1080 is using 9% more power than the GTX 980.
69% faster?
Using 9% more power means that the GTX 1080
has a performance-per-watt advantage over the GTX 980 of 55%.
That isn't fantastic.
Now, the GTX 980 is a brilliant graphics card.
Engineering-wise, it's a marvel.
Maxwell is a marvel in fact.
But my belief is the GTX 980 is the best of them all.
The only issue I ever had with it was the price.
But what we're effectively looking at here is
the most efficient Maxwell graphics card, the GTX 980,
being beaten by 55% in performance-per-watt.
On one hand, it's very impressive
but remember, we are talking the difference between 28nm and 16nm FinFETs.
Better performance-per-watt is the expectation.
And NVIDIA is talking about stuff like 2× performance-per-watt?
Well, they're not comparing it to the GTX 980 in that case,
and that's the card that they should be comparing it to.
Even compared to the Titan X it only has 69% higher performance-per-watt.
So let's take a closer look to see if we can figure out what is going on here.
I'm going to start by talking about TFLOPS.
The thing that I mentioned at the beginning of the video,
and something that I have never actually talked about until this point.
TFLOPS are about peak floating-point operations per second.
In the case of the GeForce GTX 1080, it would be 9.
That's nine with twelve zeroes.
For a long time now, TFLOPS have been used as a sort-of benchmark
of the theoretical capabilities of a graphics card
in terms of its shading performance.
In order to get to the 9 TFLOPS number,
you simply take the number of CUDA cores - which is 2560
- you then multiply that number by 2, which gives you 5120
- and then multiply that number by the clockspeed
- in this case, 1733 MHz or 1.733 GHz
- and that gives you a number of 8.9, or almost 9 TFLOPS.
If you recall, the GTX 1070 has 6.5 TFLOPS.
You can get to this number in one or two different ways.
What it basically means is: the card has less CUDA cores, and will run at lower frequencies.
I haven't actually worked out what's most likely yet -
but chances are it's going to have around about 2000 CUDA cores running at around 1.5 GHz.
Something like that.
If you remember when I talk about cut-down cards, cut-down parts: this is exactly what the GTX 1070 is.
It is simply a cut-down GTX 1080 with lower clock-speeds.
That is why it can be offered so cheaply: because it is much easier to manufacture,
and will be available in much higher volume.
Here is a list of TFLOPS in some of the currently available cards.
Right at the top we have 8.9 for the 1080
and 6.5 for the 1070.
Which is a difference of 37%.
So straight away we can see some kind of issue here.
As we know that the 1080 is 22% faster than Titan X,
and NVIDIA claims that the 1070 is actually faster than the Titan X as well,
how is that possible when the 1080 has 37% more TFLOPs?
If we just take the Titan X as a baseline of 100
and let's say 101 for the 1070
then the 1080 would be 122.
Yet in terms of TFLOPS we are looking at much larger numbers.
This makes me think that there's some kind of issue here somewhere.
The overall performance at only 22% faster than Titan X
does not seem like a very good reflection of the much higher clockspeeds,
the much higher TFLOPS.
Again these numbers are very much theoretical,
but if we take the Titan X vs. the 980 for example
we can see that the 6.6 TFLOPS of the Titan X
is 32% higher than the 5.0 TFLOPS of the 980.
And this is a fair reflection of the performance - with the Titan X being around 30% faster than the 980.
If we look at this slide again we can see that NVIDIA themselves suggest that the Titan X is around 38% faster than the 980.
So certainly in the case of Maxwell, the number of TFLOPS appears to be a good indicator of absolute performance.
So something is not adding up here.
Either the GTX 1070 is not as fast as Titan X
- which is what NVIDIA claims -
or something else is holding back the GTX 1080.
It will be very interesting to keep an eye on that one.
We already know that the GTX 1080 has slightly less bandwidth than the Titan X.
It's not a very big difference, obviously, and certain improvements in compression may help the new card.
But in terms of the TFLOPS,
it is well behind where the theory says it should be.
It may well be as simple as bandwidth.
In which case, an overclock on the memory.
At 10Gb/s GDDR5X from Micron should hopefully reflect very good increases in performance.
That assumes that the memory overclocks well.
It may be worth bearing in mind though, in future,
some aftermarket cards coming with faster memory may end up quite a lot faster.
So think about that one before you jump on the $100 more expensive “Founders Edition”.
The impression I'm coming away with here is that NVIDIA has done a really good job
- especially on the clockspeeds -
however they've maybe got a little bit [of an] unbalanced card there - with the 1080 at least.
It feels a bit like Maxwell on speed - which is certainly no bad thing.
I feel like the later cards coming with the HBM2 memory are going to absolutely destroy this card though.
GP102, Vega, I expect to be twice as fast as the GTX 980 Ti - not 25% faster.
But we probably won't know about that for another nine months or so.
The real question is: for you GTX 980 owners, is it worth $700?
Is it even worth $600 to you?
Only you can answer that one.
If you're got a 980 Ti, chances are [that] it's an overclocked aftermarket version,
which is probably already on-par with this card.
The 1070 is by far the more interesting one, at a much more realistic price,
so long as you don't fall for this “Founders Edition” bullshit.
Technically it looks very good,
marketing-wise, you know what I think about that already.
Right, this video is already longer than I had intended.
I was going to talk about the process and how NVIDIA has managed to get such high clockspeeds,
but to be honest with you, that's a video on its own.
So that's exactly what I will do at some point .
I'm going to wait and see what AMD manages with Polaris first of all though.
But I do have one or theories on that:
I would expect AMD to have very high clockspeeds as well.
Clearly FinFETs are doing an awful lot for clockspeeds here.
However I believe NVIDIA has gone the extra mile.
I really wasn't intending on doing an awful lot more of these,
but clearly now it is starting to ramp up.
I do have other videos in the pipeline,
but we're clearly getting to that stage now
where the cards are imminent.
So I'm going to be doing some more:
A bit more regular, shorter videos, while all of this goes on.
As always, there's a bunch of links in the description below.
Hopefully a lively chat as well.
I'll catch you later guys.