Rumours aplenty had elicited at the next generation of NVIDIA cards being the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, well on Friday those rumours were confirmed at a special event in Austin, Texas. NVIDIA CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang announced the latest generation of NVIDIA cards that will push gaming to a whole new level.

After “several billions of dollars” of R&D, NVIDIA’s first consumer graphics card utilizing Pascal architecture is finally here; the GTX 1080, retailing for $599 and released on May 27th, and the GTX 1070, retailing for $379 and released on June 10th. Both cost $50 more than the GTX 980 and GTX 970 respectively upon launch, but offer a huge increase in performance over their predecessors.

[embedyt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUL6Gc2g4kg&width=500&height=285[/embedyt]In the announcement, Huang demonstrated the power of the 1080, running games like The Division and Rise of the Tomb Raider at max graphics settings and a high resolution. All were running at over 60 fps at a clock speed faster than any other card currently on the market, other than a special edition liquid nitrogen cooled TITAN X.

Both the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 will use NVIDIA’s new GP104 Pascal GPU, which is both smaller and more powerful than the Maxwell GPU’s found in the 900 and Titan series’ of cards. The Pascal processors are made with a 16nm manufacturing process, meaning the 72,000 transistors are closer together and can transfer data faster than compared to the 22nm process used for the previous generation. The 1080 will have 2560 CUDA cores, a 25% increase on the 980, boasting 9 TFLOPs of performance paired with Micron’s new and faster GDDR5X memory. Currently there has been no core announced for the 1070, but it will use 8GB of GDDR5 memory and is rumoured to have 6.5 TFLOPs of performance.

In comparing the GTX 1080 to the TITAN X, currently NVIDIA’s most powerful GPU commercially available, the core clock speed sees a 36% increase from 1075Mhz to 1700Mhz. This is all due to the Pascal architecture being incredibly efficient. This efficiency can also be seen in the power efficiency/performance graph that was shown, with the GTX 1080 performing 20% better than the TITAN X whilst running at 180W, 70W less than the TITAN X’s 250W.

With the advent of the Pascal architecture, Huang also announced ‘simultaneous multi-projection’ technology. This technology allows the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 to simultaneously render 16 different viewpoints, as opposed to current GPU’s rendering a single view point. This all means that when using a multi monitor setup the monitors to your left and right will appear less warped.

The ‘simultaneous multi-projection’ combined with NVIDIA VR Works Audio drastically improves the performance of VR technology on the GTX 1080. VR Works Audio allows developers to provide a more complete VR experience, as they are able to bounce sounds off different surfaces and create accurate reverberations. Whilst the ‘simultaneous multi-projection’ allows to render stereo images in a single pass, greatly improving frame rate – meaning the GTX 1080 performs twice as good and is three times more efficient than the TITAN X at running VR.

NVIDIA also revealed their Ansel technology, that will allow you to take glorious in-game screenshots of your favourite title. It allows you pause the game, enter a free camera mode, add filters, and capture 2D, 3D and 360-degree screenshots in the highest HDR colour spectrum. Upon release The Division, The Witness, Lawbreakers, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Paragon, No Man’s Sky and Unreal Tournament will feature Ansel support.

All this means that as a gamer and streamer you will be able play the latest and greatest games on the highest settings possible, squeezing more performance at better efficiency out of your PC. The competitive price point of the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 make them the ideal choice over all the other NVIDIA GPUs currently on the market. You can watch the full announcement yourself on NVIDIA’s Twitch Channel.

AMD are yet to announce their latest series of GPUs that will use the Polaris architecture, how they will shape up against the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 is anyone’s guess. We will be sure to get an article out covering that announcement when it comes, so follow our Twitter for updates on all our articles. @StreamerSquare