We’ve seen dribs and drabs of NVIDIA’s upcoming Pascal refresh for their consumer graphics cards – from leaks of reference shrouds, to rumored (if not highly questionable) benchmarks. But the most recent slew of data has enough substance to suggest that it’s the real deal, and the timing of the leak just before NVIDIA’s announcement of a livestream event later today all but confirms that we’re about to see the next generation of consumer flagships.
Eagle-eyed folks at videocardz.com caught some benchmarks published without identifiers indicating their GPU of origin (though driver names did spill the beans), and from that they’ve been able to construct a semi-complete specifications table that compares the rumored GTX 1080 and 1070 against the recently-released Tesla P100:
| GTX 1080 | GTX 1070 | Tesla P100 | |
| GPU | 16nm FF GP104-400 | 16nm FF GP104-400 | 16nm FF GP100-890 |
| CUDA Cores | ? | ? | 3584 |
| Memory Type | 8GB GDDR5X | 8GB GDDR5 | 16GB HBM2 |
| Base Clock | ? | ? | 1328MHz |
| Memory Clock | 2500MHz | 2000MHz | 352MHz |
| Effective Memory Clock | 10000MHz | 8000MHz | 1408MHz |
| Memory Bus | 256-bit | 256-bit | 4096-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 320 GB/s | 256 GB/s | 720 GB/s |
Of note, both the GTX 1080 and 1070 look to come with 8GB of VRAM, and the reported clock of the 1080 in the 3DMark’s FireStrike Extreme benchmark would simply blow current Maxwell cards out of the water (as they only tend to reach ~1450MHz when OC’d). Still, we don’t know if that clock is the base clock, or an overclock in and of itself – and the clock actually has to be a bit higher anyway, since the 1080 benches much lower than the 980 Ti on a clock-to-clock comparison.
Still, the same benchmark looks to peg the GTX 1080’s performance at 27683 points at the 1280×720 resolution preset, which is modestly faster than a well-overclocked 980 Ti (which is to say, much faster than a reference 980 Ti, and substantially faster than the more directly comparable 980). But until NVIDIA shares all of the details, and most importantly the price, we won’t know for certain how much of a perf-per-dollar improvement enthusiasts can expect to see from these latest parts. For a few more hours, at least…
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