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

Starting time, allow's striking the technical specifications. The GTX 1070 packs 1,920 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 make full rate is theoretically the same betwixt the two cards, since they accept the same number of ROPS. Base clock is 1.5GHz with boost clocks up to i.68GHz and 8GB of 8Gbps GDDR5 retentivity (the GeForce GTX 1080 uses 8GB of 10Gbps GDDR5X retention). Retentivity bandwidth is 256GB/s, which puts the new GTX 1070 in betwixt the older GTX 980 (224GB/s) and the 980 Ti (336GB/south).

GTX1070

The GTX 1070, sans libation

As expected, this positions the GTX 1070 equally a cut-down version of the GTX 1080, though hopefully without any of the bug that indomitable the GTX 970's memory configuration. The GTX 1070 has a few changes compared with the 1080 as a issue — it uses an aluminum finned heatsink rather than the vapor-bedroom cooler that the GTX 1080 fielded, and it has a four-phase power supply rather than the GTX 1080's five phases.

Overall functioning, meanwhile, is merely fantabulous. Over at Tom's, Chris Angelini shows the GTX 1070 taking second only to the 1080 in Battlefield 4, Projection Cars, Ascension of the Tomb Raider, the Sectionalization, Witcher three, and Chiliad Theft Motorcar V. AMD fights back in games similar Ashes of the Singularity and Hitman, but the GTX 1070's base cost is $379 while the Founder'due south Edition is $449. The Fury 10, Fury, and Radeon Nano are all substantially above this, at $500+.

GTA V performance

Image past Tom's Hardware

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

1070-power

The 1070 draws over 100W less ability than the Titan X while outperforming information technology in the majority of titles. That's a stellar accomplishment for Nvidia and a huge win for gamers.

The 1070 is the new card to beat

This is the part of the review where we ordinarily cover what'due south likely coming from AMD to counter the new 1070/1080 challengers. In this instance, nonetheless, I don't await AMD to launch a menu that goes head-to-caput with Nvidia because the business firm has made it clear that Polaris 10 and 11, which launch in the non-and then-distant hereafter, are targeting different cost points. With that said, nonetheless, these new GPUs are a line in the sand that AMD will have to contend with — and it better accept brought its A game when Vega launches at the end of 2022. AMD 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 issue from the 1070 and 1080 could exist significant.

The uglier and inconvenient truth for AMD, nevertheless, is that until it launches Vega, it'south going to be stuck with the Fury Ten, Fury, and Fury Nano to anchor its loftier stop — and the GTX 1070 has simply blown those cards out of the water. With the GTX 1070 Founder's 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 order to compete. That would make the Fury a $300 – $350 card, and likely push the Nano into like territory.

At present, a Fury X at $350 would all the same be an extremely potent graphics card, but it's non clear if that kind of pricing is feasible given the difficulty of building HBM cards and the overall interposer cost. While AMD has argued that HBM is more cost-effective than GDDR5 at the highest performance levels, there's a reason why the company is using GDDR5 for its Polaris hardware — there'due south a point at which HBM simply doesn't brand fiscal sense. Given Fiji'southward large die size, there'due south also a minimum point at which AMD can sell the card and yet intermission even. This could limit how much AMD cuts prices, but price cuts for the Fury family are almost certainly inbound. One way or the other, this is going to put deep pressure on AMD's entire GPU product line — if the Fury X is slashed to $350-$400 to hold its value confronting the 1070, that means the R9 390X needs its own price cut as well. Presumably AMD volition cutting cost on the Fury family, launch Polaris, then retire all the GPU models obviated past this ii-tier approach.

Final annotation: When the Oculus Rift and Vive launched, we recommended taking a wait-and-encounter approach earlier investing in current hardware for the purposes of gaming in VR. That approach has been thoroughly vindicated by the performance of both the GTX 1080 and 1070. The 1070 in particular beats the Titan 10, can leverage the aforementioned VR-improving technologies every bit the 1080, and yet costs less than half as much as Titan X (and significantly less than the GTX 980 Ti). In games that support Nvidia'southward GameWorks VR, the gap betwixt Titan Ten and 1080/1070 should be even larger, and anyone who bought a VR-set organization with a GTX 970 or 980 class card in information technology is likely kicking themselves now. Yeah, faster GPU tech is ever nether development, merely sometimes the leaps between production generations are larger than others. The 1080 / 1070 improvements are quite significant — now is a much better time to buy into VR than just a few months ago.