NVIDIA Launches Faster Memory GTX 1080 and GTX 1060 Graphics Cards

Just a day after AMD officially launched their 500 series Polaris graphics cards, NVIDIA has outfitted their GTX 1080 and GTX 1060 with faster memory variants. In even better news, these cards are going to be aggressively priced to put even more pressure on AMD. The Founder’s Edition model of the  GTX 1080 for example, launched at $699 with the partner cards priced at $599, but the new GTX 1080 11Gbps model will be available for $100 less at only $499.

NVIDIA has reworked the underlying memory architecture for Pascal to squeeze out some performance gains, taking advantage of highspeed G5X, next generation compression and tiled caching. Although the GPU core performance is the same (2560 CUDA cores and GPU clock speeds staying at 1607 MHz base and 1733 MHz boost), the next generation memory improvements alone give the GTX 1080 and GTX 1060 advantage over their original versions. The 11Gbps speed of the new GTX 1080 gives it a 352 GB/s bandwidth allowance compared to the 320 GB/s of the original version.

The GTX 1060 on the other hand gets bumped up to 216 GB/s bandwidth from 192.2 GB/s compared to the original with its new 9Gbps memory. This card is going to go head-to-head against AMD’s latest Radeon RX 580 graphics card and will be priced around $300.

Aside from the lower price, the best part is partner cards will also be offering many variant offerings with alternate cooling designs and custom VRM as well as faster GPU clock speeds at the same day as launch to give buyers even more options to choose from.