NVIDIA has managed to, yet again, wow the entire PC gaming community by delivering possibly the best possible consumer graphics card ever made in the GTX 1080. First off is the new GDDR5X memory module. This brand new VRAM adds a lot to the 1080’s ability to push frames at resolutions beyond 1920x1080, making it an ideal GPU for people looking to get good frame rates at 2K and 4K respectively.
The most impressive achievement, however, is the insane clock speeds that the Founder’s Edition comes with. With a base clock of 1607 MHZ and with 8GB of GDDR5X memory, it is the fastest consumer GPU ever made. What makes this even more impressive is that the test bench drew an astonishing 290W on full load. The one aspect where the 1080 does fall short though is that of the thermals. When fan speeds were left to their default profiles, the 1080 saw some really bad thermal throttling, with clock speeds dropping below the base clock. This is however easily rectified by going into any third party PC monitoring software and manually jacking up the fan speeds to 90 or 100 per cent.
Moving on to the performance, well, it’s safe to say that NVIDIA left no stone unturned in this regard. The 1080 blazed through all the games on 1080p without breaking a single sweat! Very demanding games like The Witcher 3 ran at a smooth 101 frames per second and maintained an astounding 82 frames per second at 2K with all settings turned up to the very maximum. Perhaps the most impressive result was how well the 1080 tested on Ashes of The Singularity’s in game benchmark at 2K and with all settings turned up to the very highest. NVIDIA’s new flagship blew it completely out of the water by clocking in a whopping 49 FPS! To put that number into perspective, the 980 only managed a paltry 19 FPS at the same settings, with the closest competitor being AMD’s Fury, at 29 frames per second.
All in all the 1080 is one monstrous addition to NVIDIA’s GPU lineup. The only drawback is the high price of Rs 63,500 for the Founder’s Edition. If you have the cash and are looking to always play games at resolutions higher than full HD, get this monster otherwise you could wait a few weeks for the GTX 1070 which should give a better price to performance ratio.
