While Nvidia is adamant about comparing the 1080 vs the 980, price-wise it's going to be the 1080 vs 980Ti which to me matters most. Simply because I hope most buy a label or a brand, but a product and as such take performance and price into consideration. Although I see the merit in comparing a previous generation card to it's successor, that previous card has been available for 25% less for about a year.
But see, that's what makes the comparison imbalanced, you're comparing the price of a year-old thing to the price of a day-old thing. As you elaborate:
The 980 also came out at a much higher price than currently, so for all the people with a GTX 980Ti, it might be more interesting to wait out for that price drop or to wait for a possible GTX 1080Ti.
For the sake of tracking
generational improvement, you have to "control" for the age of the part and compare day-one prices and speeds. Prices drop on components over time because their useful life is diminished, and that has to be priced in to the cost. But that has nothing to do with the generational improvement, that's just market effects.
Consequentially, given that the GTX 980 landed at $549, the 980 Ti at $649, and the 1080 at $599, the 1080 is equidistant price-wise from either card, and thus should be considered to be equally comparable to either. It's not any more comparable to the 980 than the 980 Ti.
So, if we control for price, we get this:
980: 4610 GFLOPS / $549 = 8.39
980 Ti: 5630 GFLOPS / $649 = 8.67
980 SLI: 8298 GFLOPS / $1098 = 7.55
1080: 8900 GFLOPS / $599 = 14.85
(Prices are MSRP at launch)
As you can see, the 1080 actually is in striking distance of 2x the 980 in perf-per-dollar terms. It's closer still to 2x when you're comparing to 980 SLI, which I'd say is the fairer comparison in this instance. And the 980 Ti wasn't all that much better than the 980, so the 1080 still stands out.
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HOWEVER... For perf-per-dollar, or "value" comparisons, the methodof analysis changes because you aren't asking what the improvement is, you're asking about
performance for each individual solution in absolute terms. Which, you can then compare, of course, to see which is the "value" buy, but that's very different from generational improvement (even if it seems the same) because the variable pricing makes the comparison dynamic.
I'm having fun with this, though, so let's take a look at a straight-up value analysis. If we do that, but control for price (which is to say, take the raw compute performance and then divide by the lowest price available now), you get:
980: 4610 GFLOPS / $440 = 10.47
980 Ti: 5630 GFLOPS / $530 = 10.62
980 SLI: 8298 GFLOPS / $880 = 9.42
1080: 8900 GFLOPS / $599 = 14.85
(Prices are from Newegg and exclude shipping; I just looked for the best deal for a given card)
Much closer! This tells us that, assuming stock clocks, the GTX 1080
today provides:
- A 42% improvement in perf-per-dollar over the 980
- A 40% improvement in perf-per-dollar over the 980 Ti
- A 58% improvement in perf-per-dollar over 980 SLI
In other words, in perf-per-dollar terms, you ain't doubling the 980. These are still pretty big improvements, in my opinion, but they're a lot less dramatic than "double".
Another fun thing we can do is work backwards and figure out what the cost of a particular solution would have to be, to match the perf-per-dollar of the 1080. That looks like this:
980: 4610 GFLOPS / 14.85 = $310
980 Ti: 5630 GFLOPS / 14.85 = $379
980 SLI: 8298 GFLOPS / 14.85 = $559
One final note: this value analysis ignores all the other improvements that NVIDIA is bringing, and lives in raw compute rather than strictly gaming performance, so it needs to be contextualized. It ignores the sole 8-pin connector, it ignores whatever technologies won't be backwards compatible, it ignores the fact that Maxwell is older, and that your ceiling for expansion is much lower, and so forth. It ignores the memory performance, which has nothing to do with raw compute but would manifest itself in performance improvements in some games. And it makes some assumptions about scaling and so forth. So none of this is precise - I'll probably repeat the calculations once we have broad comparisons from testers - but it should be pretty close.
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A GTX 980 vs GTX 1080 with 65% speed increase sounds like an awesome upgrade.
A GTX 980Ti vs GTX 1080 with 20% speed increase sounds much less enticing.
Especially since a second-hand GTX 980Ti seems to go at about 2/3rds the GTX 1080's price.
The actual improvements will be larger. If I put exact figures on this, with respect to raw compute:
- The GTX 1080 is 93% faster than the GTX 980
- The GTX 1080 is 66% faster than the GTX 980 Ti
- The GTX 1080 is 7% faster than GTX 980's in SLI
The gaming benchmarks will almost certainly give us narrower improvements, at least for the single cards, but we'll have to wait for those.
Some Polaris specs have leaked (unconfirmed). As previously thought, they will not be competing with the 1070 and 1080.
The interesting part though is that there is rumoured to be a card with a TDP of 50W offering 2.5TFLOPs of compute performance. This should make a nice PCIe Powered card, great for SFF PC's.
That's what I'm hoping for! A lot of people will find that incredibly useful, especially when you're talking ~6L and below
