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GTX1070-Feature

When Nvidia launched the GTX 1080 earlier this month, it established its new Pascal-derived GPUs equally leaders in the top of the market. Now, as expected, the GTX 1070 has dropped, piledriving both Nvidia'southward previous cards and every elevation-stop GPU AMD has to offer.

First, permit's hit the technical specifications. The GTX 1070 packs i,920 CUDA cores, 120 texture units, and 64 ROPS. That works out to 75% the cores and texture units of the larger GTX 1080, but the pixel fill up rate is theoretically the same between the two cards, since they have the aforementioned number of ROPS. Base of operations clock is ane.5GHz with boost clocks upwardly to ane.68GHz and 8GB of 8Gbps GDDR5 memory (the GeForce GTX 1080 uses 8GB of 10Gbps GDDR5X retentivity). Memory bandwidth is 256GB/s, which puts the new GTX 1070 in between the older GTX 980 (224GB/southward) and the 980 Ti (336GB/due south).

GTX1070

The GTX 1070, sans libation

Equally expected, this positions the GTX 1070 as a cut-downwardly version of the GTX 1080, though hopefully without any of the problems that indomitable the GTX 970'due south memory configuration. The GTX 1070 has a few changes compared with the 1080 equally a result — it uses an aluminum finned heatsink rather than the vapor-bedchamber cooler that the GTX 1080 fielded, and it has a iv-phase power supply rather than the GTX 1080's five phases.

Overall performance, meanwhile, is but excellent. Over at Tom'south, Chris Angelini shows the GTX 1070 taking second merely to the 1080 in Battleground 4, Project Cars, Rising of the Tomb Raider, the Partitioning, Witcher 3, and Grand Theft Machine V. AMD fights back in games similar Ashes of the Singularity and Hitman, simply the GTX 1070'south base price is $379 while the Founder'southward Edition is $449. The Fury X, Fury, and Radeon Nano are all substantially above this, at $500+.

GTA V performance

Image by Tom's Hardware

Hot Hardware presents like results in somewhat unlike titles. The GTX 1070 is faster than the Fury X in Shadows of Mordor and Thief. HH also posted some ability consumption data on these cards, which is where the 1070 really shines:

1070-power

The 1070 draws over 100W less power than the Titan 10 while outperforming it in the majority of titles. That's a stellar achievement for Nvidia and a huge win for gamers.

The 1070 is the new card to trounce

This is the part of the review where we normally cover what's likely coming from AMD to counter the new 1070/1080 challengers. In this case, all the same, I don't look AMD to launch a bill of fare that goes caput-to-head with Nvidia because the house has made it clear that Polaris 10 and xi, which launch in the not-and then-afar future, are targeting dissimilar price points. With that said, all the same, these new GPUs are a line in the sand that AMD will take to contend with — and information technology amend have brought its A game when Vega launches at the finish of 2016. AMD tin can stake out a profitable position in the midrange and upkeep spaces with a new Polaris and probably win some market share in mobile, but the halo effect from the 1070 and 1080 could exist meaning.

The uglier and inconvenient truth for AMD, nonetheless, is that until it launches Vega, it's going to be stuck with the Fury X, Fury, and Fury Nano to ballast its loftier end — and the GTX 1070 has just blown those cards out of the water. With the GTX 1070 Founder'south Edition coming in at $449 and the base card at $379, AMD needs to slash the price on Fury Ten to between $350 and $400 in society to compete. That would make the Fury a $300 – $350 card, and likely push the Nano into similar territory.

Now, a Fury Ten at $350 would nonetheless exist an extremely potent graphics card, just information technology's not clear if that kind of pricing is viable given the difficulty of building HBM cards and the overall interposer cost. While AMD has argued that HBM is more than cost-effective than GDDR5 at the highest performance levels, there'south a reason why the company is using GDDR5 for its Polaris hardware — in that location's a betoken at which HBM just doesn't brand financial sense. Given Fiji's big die size, in that location'due south likewise a minimum point at which AMD can sell the carte and still break even. This could limit how much AMD cuts prices, but price cuts for the Fury family are nearly certainly inbound. One way or the other, this is going to put deep pressure on AMD'due south entire GPU product line — if the Fury X is slashed to $350-$400 to hold its value against the 1070, that means the R9 390X needs its ain toll cutting too. Presumably AMD will cut price on the Fury family, launch Polaris, and then retire all the GPU models obviated past this 2-tier approach.

Final note: When the Oculus Rift and Vive launched, we recommended taking a wait-and-see approach earlier investing in electric current hardware for the purposes of gaming in VR. That approach has been thoroughly vindicated by the functioning of both the GTX 1080 and 1070. The 1070 in particular beats the Titan X, can leverage the same VR-improving technologies as the 1080, and nonetheless costs less than half as much every bit Titan X (and significantly less than the GTX 980 Ti). In games that back up Nvidia's GameWorks VR, the gap between Titan 10 and 1080/1070 should be even larger, and anyone who bought a VR-set system with a GTX 970 or 980 grade card in it is likely kicking themselves now. Yeah, faster GPU tech is ever nether development, but sometimes the leaps between product generations are larger than others. The 1080 / 1070 improvements are quite significant — now is a much ameliorate time to buy into VR than just a few months ago.