Nvidia has finally given the users a first look at the GeForce GTX 1070, its next graphics card.
With Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 available on the market in a couple of weeks, it is never been a better time to be a PC gamer. Graphic cards are becoming both cheaper and more powerful. The rise of virtual reality offers a tempting upgrade target and most big-budget console games are making it to PCs.
According to The Verge, the GeForce GTX 1070 is slower than the champion graphics card GeForce GTX 1080, but it is also cheaper. Compared to the 1080's $599 price tag, the 1070 is just $379.
The discount in price also applies to almost every aspect of the card. There are fewer texture units and CUDA cores, and the clock speed is a little lower. The power demands are lower. The memory quantity is 8GB of VRAM, the same as for the GTX 1080, but its speed is slower, reaching 8Gbps GDDR5 instead of 10Gbps GDDR5X.
Users who want the top of the line 1080 will have to pay a premium, but for most people, that might be overkill. Unless game demands catch up or one has an underutilized 4K monitor on his desk, the GTX 1070 might be exactly what one needs.
According to PC Gamer, Nvidia has posted to its official site GeForce.com the full specifications of the upcoming GTX 1070. The graphics card will reach 6.5 TFLOPS of performance. The lower clock speed combined with reducing the number of SMs and the shader cores from 20 down to 15 resulted in a 28 percent lower computational performance compared to the GTX 1080.
The GDDR5 memory clocked at 8 GHz provides a net result of 20 percent less bandwidth than the 1080. These factors combined give 1070 around 75 percent to 80 percent of the 1080 performance. The result is a good combination of performance and price, considering that the 1070 costs just 63 percent of the cost of 1080.
