 It has been quite some time since Nvidia has graced us with a new 80 series GPU. 20 months, in fact, since the last one. So when we got the GTX 1080 in hands, it felt like a momentous occasion, especially with the Vive and the Oculus Rift so recently hitting market. And since Nvidia is billing their new 1080s Pascal architecture as one of their most ambitious projects yet, and saying that it can beat out their flagship Titan X and a pair of 980s and SLI, I think it's time to see if it can live up to the hype. So the GTX 1080 is their first card in their new line of Pascal GPUs, continuing the tradition of Nvidia, naming new generations of GPUs after old dead guys who were legendarily good at physics and math. And speaking of math, the card's GP104 GPU can certainly do a lot of processing, with 2,560 CUDA cores, 1,733 MHz base clock, and a 16 nanometer process, which is able to allow them to pack way more transistors onto the chip for increased performance. Nvidia also switched to a new type of VRAM called GDDR5X, which runs at about 10 gigabits per second. Nvidia says that GDDR5X, combined with various improvements like memory compression, it ends up being 1.7 times faster in terms of effective memory bandwidth than a GTX 980. They crammed 8 gigabytes of the stuff inside the 1080, but if you are more inclined to go for the 1070 when that comes out, it also has 8 gigabytes, but just more standard GDDR5. So keep that in mind if you will be disappointed by buying a product that has slightly less Xs on its product sheet. But beyond raw specs, there were also some other features that Nvidia baked into the Pascal Pi, such as simultaneous multiprojection, which allows Pascal to project 16 different viewports, each with the ability to rotate in order to better match the current display setup that you have, and it has the ability to project more than one of these viewports at once. This enables graphics techniques such as perspective surround, which can correct image perspectives across multiple monitors, so you don't get that weird warping on multi-monitor surround anymore, and like massive scale issues and stuff. That should be fixed. Then there's a personal favorite of mine, single pass stereo. This allows Pascal to render geometry for an object in VR only once instead of twice per eye. Then it just uses simple transforms to generate the view for both eyes. But if you're not really into VR and you want something for the desktop side, never fear, there's something for you as well, and that's called multi-res shading. Nvidia included multi-res shading for the desktop guys as well. It allows you to focus more of your GPU power near the center of the screen and less on the outside. This will result in higher resolution and detail in the middle and lower resolution and detail on the outside, where you are theoretically paying less attention to. This should help performance, but we'll see if it really matters later on. When used for VR, various SMP techniques, including the ones not fully covered here, equate to 1.5 times the pixel throughput and 2 times the geometry throughput than would otherwise have been possible. Then there's Ansel technology, which was introduced to take gaming screenshots to the next level, which sounds like the most boring thing possible, but just hang with me. It allows you to take screenshots from any angle and position by using a free-floating camera that can detach from your character. It also allows you to run simple filters over these images for that oh-so-professional Instagram look. It also allows you to take RAW or EXR photos, giving you full dynamic range for all your image editing needs. It takes said photos or screenshots in super resolution, which is currently limited to 4.5 gigapixel images with 3,600 kuda-stitched tiles. This limitation is because of game settings, the resolution of the game, and the speed of your storage drive, so it should actually be expected to increase in the future. And last but not least is 360 degree photos, so you can capture those legendary fight scenes in awesomely unique ways and then view them in VR or whatever. Although when all is said and done, I expect most of the pictures from Ansel will be using the free camera to capture derpy faces of NPCs. Ansel does have to be enabled by the developer, and right now there's only a relatively short list of games that support it, and I wouldn't expect a huge amount of multiplayer games to either. Yes, The Division is included, but I think it's not going to be in the dark zone. That's it for Ansel, and then we come to VRWorks Audio and VRWorks Touch. VR Audio can trace the physical path of sound to give you a more realistic experience while you're using a headset, and VR Touch uses PhysX to improve on how things in the environment react with your virtual hands. Both of these should make pretty good improvements in terms of immersion in the future once they're more implemented. Now we got our hands on the Founders Edition, which sounds fancy but is really just what Nvidia is calling the reference version of this card, and is selling for $699, a full $100 more than the MSRP for base models from add-in partners whose cards I expect to see at Computex like they were last time, so stay tuned to Linus Tech Tips for that. Nvidia is trying to justify the higher cost by saying that they're using premium components in manufacturing like die-cast aluminum and a low-profile backplate, along with a vapor chamber which should improve cooling, but it's important to note that the chips in the Founders Edition boards shouldn't be binned in any way. The cooler for the 1080 is similar to the silver and black shrouds and blower style fan that we've seen Nvidia doing for quite a while now, but has a more angled aggressive look reminiscent of basically every environment in the last Deus Ex game. The connectivity support is good as it features HDMI 2.0 for 4k at 60Hz, three DisplayPoint 1.4 connectors for 4k at 120Hz or 8k at 60Hz, holy crap, and a dual-link DVI. However, the 1080 only supports two-way SLI natively even though it has two SLI fingers. That is because the two SLI fingers have been teamed together to improve bandwidth with the new SLI bridge. Nvidia no longer recommends three- and four-way SLI, which is probably a good thing to be honest, but they do suggest if you need to burn that much money on that many cards that you do two-way SLI and have a third card just for PhysX, but it is possible to force three-way and four-way SLI if you sign up for Nvidia Enthusiast Key, which registers your card. I expect an even worse experience from this form of SLI than past versions of SLI and would wholeheartedly not recommend it. All in all, Nvidia has called this the largest chip processor endeavor in the history of humanity with a multi-billion dollar budget which Nvidia's CEO speculated might be enough to go to Mars. But as Nvidia is in the business of making GPUs, not sending people off to other worlds for interplanetary land parties, let's move on. And just a note, if it seems like we don't have a lot of AMD cards in our testing, it's because the new Polaris AMD architecture, which is supposed to compete with Pascal, is right around the corner. It's not quite here yet. We'll have much more from the red team when those cards drop. With that being said, let's have a look at how the benchmarking turned out. All the testing was done at 4k because what's the point of running things at lower res when you have the power of something like a 1080? And speaking of which, if you do have this nice setup but a 1080p monitor, it's better to run your games at higher resolutions anyways with super sampling and then just have them displayed on your 1080p monitor. If you're wondering how to do that, check the guide up here. We are waiting for the VR games market to mature a bit before we test it very much because it's a little bit messy right now, but we did throw Crysis 3 and Star Wars Battlefront at the 1080 and various other cards to see how they would perform, and the 1080 solidly beat the Fury X and Titan X and then ran right alongside the SLI 980s, which was quite impressive. Having a single card run toe-to-toe with a dual card setup while being just over half the price is a strong start for our new funny named friend. For DirectX 12 performance, we booted up Rise of the Tomb Raider and Hitman. The 1080 pulled off some impressive numbers, crushing the Titan X and laughing at the 980s as they flopped around in confused SLI enabled circles as they struggled with poor DX 12 optimizations. AMD's performance here was stronger than the 900 series, but the 1080 was still able to manage an overall victory. While those numbers were a little bit all over, the DirectX 11 performance for these games was more of a standard curve with performance expectations lining up nice and orderly. If you're aiming for 4k at 60 FPS, then the 1080 will not disappoint as it's able to run everything on high presets near or above 60 frames per second, proving the respectively cheaper and when looking at the Titan X, better performing option on the Nvidia side. For power draw, the entire bench only drew 252 watts from the wall, which gives you a ton of options in terms of lower wattage power supplies, we've been SFX power supplies and whatnot. The thermals were standard fare from Nvidia with all of our cards holding steady at around 81 to 83 degrees Celsius. So our Nvidia's claims about it beating a Titan X and SLI 980s true? I'd say mostly. It does cleanly beat the Titan X across the board, but putting it up against a 980 duo is a bit more of a mixed bag. It won some of the benchmarks but lost others. The losses however, at least in actual games, were quite narrow and in any event the 1080 is clearly the better choice for newer games, especially when they have DX12 support and it frees you from the well documented issues with SLI. For dollars per frame we're assuming a value of $599 for the 1080 in our calculations as we expect whatever you're able to get from the add-in board partners should either match or beat the reference Founders Edition card while being $100 cheaper. So this dollars per frame is for Pascal 1080 in general, not the Founders Edition. The 1080 blows everything away in this metric except for the R9 390X in Hitman specifically, but when you consider that the 390X has lower frame rates across the board it's still a pretty darn compelling value to get an aftermarket 1080. So what's our conclusion? Well for $599 if that is your budget for a card the 1080 is a no-brainer. Its ability to hit 60 FPS at 4k with lots of eye candy in the latest titles combined with per frame cost that's basically the lowest in the world of high-end graphics cards right now it's a pretty obvious choice again if that is your budget. We still haven't gotten a single GPU card that can run 4k games at 60 FPS with max settings without breaking a sweat and at $600 the 1080 is still pretty steep in terms of pricing but it is the king of the hill for now. It'll be interesting to see what results we can get with overclocking as Nvidia is claiming a lot in that department and how well AMD's Polaris will answer this challenge especially once DirectX 12 games hit the market later this year. Thanks for watching guys hopefully the animal noises weren't too annoying. This was filmed in Mexico we are not back yet although the embargo will be like six hours after we land or something so if you liked the video like it if you disliked it and you were like this was filmed in a ghetto way and there's animal noises and you can dislike it be subscribed if you want to see more coverage of the 1080 if it's anything like 980 we'll release a lot of videos on it. If you want a t-shirt that's cool you can check out the link in the description down below you can become a contributor on the forum you can use our Amazon affiliate code to buy stuff like new GPUs in the next little while Polaris Pascal which one you get which P are you deciding to go for I don't know it's up to you yeah check out this video this is the launch video for the GTX 980 I don't know why you would watch it right now but go watch it anyways and I'll see you next time