Since the launch of Nvidia’s GeForce Pascal range of graphics cards, gamers have waited for the inevitable release of the GTX 1080 Ti, a card (like its predecessors) designed to offer gamers close to Titan levels of performance but at drastically reduced prices.
Nvidia have a tradition of cutting the amount of VRAM in the Ti range of GeForce graphics cards (such as halving the VRAM with the 980 Ti), but finally we have at least some evidence that the GTX 1080 Ti will feature 10 GB of VRAM, down from the 12 GB in Pascal based Titan X.
Logically, Nvidia will use a GP102 core for the GTX 1080 Ti, the very same core which powers the Titan X. We can make the assumption Nvidia will opt to cut down the number of SM units (perhaps from 22 at most 26, each SM contains 128 CUDA cores, and the Pascal Titan X has 3584 CUDA cores, while the vanilla GeForce GTX 1080 has ‘just’ 2560). Assuming a number of 48, it would slot the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti rather comfortably between both the GTX 1080 and its big brother, the GTX Titan X.
Naturally, fewer SMs allow Nvidia to better bin GP102 chips which don’t quite make the cut to power the Titan X, and thus have better profit margins. It’ll be interesting to see if Nvidia opt to keep core clocks similar, or perhaps slightly raise them for the Ti.
VideoCardz.com spotted a rather interesting item in a Zauba shipping manifest, detailing a product described as “FOC / PG611 SKU0010 GPU / 384-BIT 10240MB GDDR COMPUTER GRAPHICS CARDS, 699-1G611-0010-000”.
Since the Pascal based Titan X contained a very similar name (699-1G611-0000-000, which means PG611 SKU 00) one can make a logical conclusion that this is an entirely new card from Nvidia.
The only fly in the ointment is the label of a 384-bit memory bus, which is at odds to 10 GB VRAM (which would likely use 320-bit memory bus). It is possible that these engineering samples simply do not have the memory controllers disabled and things will be different for the final retail product.
In theory this should allow the new Titan X to offer about 400GB/s memory bandwidth (depending on the final memory clocks of the presumably GDDR5X memory), which is down from the 480 GB/s of the Titan X.
