GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Video Card Review

Intro

The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is the a video card from NVIDIA. With 3,584 processing cores and 11 GiB of video RAM, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is one of the the highest-end video cards available today. Let’s test it!
The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is based on the Pascal architecture, which was launched in May 2016, with the GeForce GTX 1080. It uses the GP102 chip, the same used on the Titan X Pascal. Actually, the only differences between the Titan X Pascal and the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is that the last one comes with one memory chip less, and higher clock rates.
The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti has 3,584 cores running at 1,480 Mhz base clock and 1,582 MHz turbo clock. It has 11 GiB of GDDR5X memory running at 11 GHz, with 352-bit bus, for a bandwidth of 484 GiB/s. Its TDP is 250 W and the minimum power supply is 600 W.
We tested the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti “Founders Edition”, which is the reference model offered by NVIDIA itself. Video card manufacturers like ASUS, Gigabyte, Zotac, Galax, EVGA, etc, can offer custom models. It costs USD 700 for both Founders Edition and custom models.
Just like its less expensive sisters, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti supports SMP (Simultaneous Multi-Projection) technology, which is useful for Virtual Reality applications, and the Ansel technology, which allows to capture an in-game high-resolution picture with any camera position and even 360 degrees.
The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti supports SLI technology, that combines the processing power of two or more video cards.
Figure 1 shows the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FE video card.

Figure 1: the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition

AMD offers one video card that costs the same as the GTX 1080 Ti: the Radeon Pro Duo, but we had not access to this card (it is actually very difficult to find). So, we decided to benchmark the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti against the GeForce GTX 1080. We also included the GeForce GTX 1060, to see what is the performance gap between different price categories. So, keep in mind that the cards included in this comparison are not direct competitors to the GTX 1080 Ti.
In the table below, we compare the main specs from the video cards we included in this review. Prices were researched at Newegg.com for this article.

Now let’s take a closer look to the tested video card.