Big Boy Club The Titan X is a monstrous card, there can be no doubt about it. It’s also a pretty terrible example of value for money. When we last looked at it our opinion was that you were better off getting two GTX 1080 cards in SLI for about the same money. The Titan X is really just a show-off card or for people who need as much power as possible, but can’t spring for a Quadro.
Soon however, we may be seeing something in between the Titan X and the GTX 1080. That card is likely to be called the 1080 Ti and would follow the Nvidia tradition of releasing in between models with a bit more juice squeezed from existing GPUs.
The Numbers That may be a little different in this case though. Instead of bumping up the GP104 that powers the existing 1080, the Ti model may be a GP102 from the Titan X cut down a little bit.
What we think we know about the 1080 Ti points to a GP102 GPU with 3328 CUDA cores a 1.5Ghz base clock and a 1.6Ghz boost clock. It may also feature 12GB of GDDR5 at 8Gbps, which is right in Titan X territory.
The memory bus is likely to be 384-bit, so there’s also a whack of bandwidth on the cards.
TDP is rumoured to be 250W, which means a good 600W PSU will meet the total system requirements.
So let’s position this card quickly. The 1080 is pushing 8.9 TFLOPs and the Titan X (Pascal) is pushing about 11 TFLOPs. Based on the leaked numbers, the 1080 Ti will sit on 10.8 TFLOPS. If these numbers are right the 1080 Ti is going to be so close to the Titan X in performance that it won’t matter.
The most important factor then will be price. Honestly, if these number are right it is hard to see why the Titan X should exist at all, other than for bragging rights. If the Ti is prices at 10-25% over the 1080 it will be a no-brainer. The Titan X may very soon be dead and by it’s own maker’s hand.
It’s likely that we’ll hear an official launch of the 1080Ti at CES 2017, so there is still some time. If you can wait, it would be good to hold off on either a Titan X or a 1080 until we know more, but the 1080 Ti stands to blow the sub-$1000 flagship card sector apart, that is unless AMD pulls a rabbit out of its hat with the 490.
Whatever happens, this is going to be a titanic battle. We live in interesting times indeed.
