Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition

If you spent over a grand on a Titan X card a few months ago then you might want to flip through the next couple of pages and pretend you haven’t seen them.

- Ben Hardwidge

We knew there would be a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, of course – we carried this very warning at the end of our Titan X review, as Nvidia has undermined its Titan cards a few months after their launches for several GPU generations now. This time, though, the GTX 1080 Ti doesn’t sit under the Titan; it actually beats it, while costing around £400 less money.

The two cards are based on the same 16nm GP102 Pascal GPU core, but with a few little adjustments here and there. For example, the GTX 1080 Ti only comes with 11GB of GDDR5X memory, compared to 12GB on the Titan X, but that 1GB will make no difference in current games, even at 4K. The change in memory configuration also means the GTX 1080 Ti has a slightly narrower memory interface, going from the Titan’s 384-bit bus to a 352-bit bus, and it also has 88 ROPs, compared to 96 on the Titan X.

These small changes to the memory configuration are unlikely to make much difference in games anyway, especially when the GTX 1080 Ti has an 11GHz (effective) memory frequency, compared to 10GHz for the Titan X, meaning the GTX 1080 Ti effectively has even more memory bandwidth at its disposal.

Otherwise, the GPU is the same, featuring six graphics processing clusters (GPCs), giving you a total of 28 streaming multiprocessors, which divides further into 3,584 stream processors.

The stock clock speed has also been pushed up a bit on the GTX 1080 Ti, with a 1408MHz base clock (1582MHz boost), compared to a 1417MHz base clock (1531MHz boost) on the Titan X. Based on previous releases, we were expecting the GTX 1080 Ti to be a cut-down Titan X, perhaps with one GPC disabled, but in actuality, the GTX 1080 Ti should be the faster card in games, despite its significantly lower price tag.