Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has announced the new GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 gaming GPUs, which are faster and cheaper than the company's previous GPUs.
On May 6, Nvidia made a number of gaming announcements at an event, but the unveiling of the GTX 1080 — Nvidia's first gaming GPU based on the latest Pascal architecture — was one of the most significant.
"It's insane. The 1080 is insane, It's almost irresponsible amounts of performance," said Huang. "This is the future of graphics, available today. 1080 is the new king."
Huang says that the GTX 1080 offers fast performance, power efficient and has capabilities great for AAA games.
Nvidia confirms that the GTX 1080 will have a price tag of $599 and the GTX 1070 will retail for $379 at launch. The prices are $50 more than the previous generation card at initial launch. Nvidia says that the GTX 1080 will be available on May 27 and the GTX 1070 from June 10.
It is surprising that Nvidia has increased the launch price of its new GPUs, but it is worth noting that these GPU cards are quite faster when compared to Nvidia's existing flagships, the GTX Titan X and GTX 980 Ti. The Titan X retails for $1,000 and the 980 Ti for $650.
Nvidia says that its new GPUs are twice as fast and three times more efficient than the Titan X.
Apart from new GPUs, Nvidia has also announced a few new software features. The company's new Ansel tool is helpful in taking in-game screenshots. At launch, Ansel will support No Man's Sky, The Witcher 3 and The Division.
Virtual reality (VR) is the next big thing in the gaming industry. To take advantage of the market trend, Nvidia also has a couple of enhancements for VR: Nvidia VR Works Audio and Simultaneous Multi-Projection.
For showcasing VR Works Audio, the company will release a collection of mini-games dubbed The Nvidia VR Funhouse for the HTC Vive, a VR headset made by HTC.
Now that Nvidia has revealed the next-generation graphics card, the company's rival such as AMD is also expected to launch its graphics cards based on the Polaris architecture in the coming weeks.
