Nvidia GTX1080 Ti Founders Edition Review

Conclusion

Our job here is to test the hardware in the most consistent – and therefore comparable – way possible and then use our years of experience to explain the good and bad points in carefully crafted words. 

The first part of this is easy enough thanks to our good working practises and refusal to bow to pressure from the manufacturers to do it a certain way that might be preferential to their product. Unfortunately for us the second part of the job has been rendered extraordinarily difficult by the jaw-dropping, brain-melting performance of the GTX 1080 Ti.

It seems like yesterday, and to be honest it isn’t much further away than that, when we were manfully battling to express our amazement at how much nVidia had improved upon the Maxwell performance with the Pascal GPU. It’s not as if the GTX 1080 has been usurped at the top of the performance pile in the interim time so the appearance of the GTX 1080 Ti, whilst not unexpected, didn’t give us much particular worry. After all, the GTX 1080 was ridiculously capable so how, in such a short time, could nVidia give us anything more than a slightly refreshed version with perhaps a little extra performance or a teensy bit better efficiency. Once the whispers started that the GTX 1080 Ti was 35% faster than the GTX 1080 you would forgive us if we didn’t exactly leap around the room. It wouldn’t be the first rumour that was unfounded, and 35% isn’t exactly a small amount. Surely it would take an entirely new GPU before we saw those kind of improvements?

Oh we of little faith.

The GTX 1080 Ti is so fast, so capable, so ridiculously extreme in its performance that it makes us laugh with delight. It requires recalibrating your brain. Even the very latest titles are so easily handled that you end up poring through the settings to see if “Ultra” is as high as you can go, because there is so much performance overhead that you feel the GTX 1080 Ti is largely twiddling its thumbs. It’s the equivalent of asking Fernando Alonso to take you to the shops, or Patrick Stewart to voice over a commercial. You can almost hear the Pascal GPU yawning as it gives you yet another result deeply into the triple digit frame rate. 

What makes this even more unbelievable is that we’re running the nVidia GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition here. It’s the stock card, with a stock cooler. No fancy overclocking trickery. No multi-fan cooling solution to unleash the capabilities of the GPU Boost technology. Just a regular card and it annihilates the GTX 1080 and often times matches the GTX 1080 SLI setups. What is it going to be like when the partner cards arrive and the drivers mature even further?? We can barely begin to imagine.

So the nVidia GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition. Insane performance, fantastic efficiency and bundles of potential. At this point you’d be forgiven for assuming it comes with a significant price hike over the regular GTX 1080. Nope. The GTX 1080 has seen prices slashed and the GTX 1080 Ti slips into its current position in the marketplace. It’s nothing but good news, and the GTX 1080 Ti comfortably wins our OC3D Performance Award.

  

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