Nvidia May Launch 3 Pascal GP104 SKUs at Computex

For those of you hoping for massive performance jump with the launch of Pascal, prepare to be disappointed. Every new generation tends to improve performance but some more than others. According to previous rumours, Nvidia is using their GP104 die to replace the GTX 980Ti with the GTX 1080 and 1070. Now, the latest reports are suggesting that Nvidia will launch 3 different Pascal SKUs, all based off of GP104, at Computex.

As the xx4 die, GP104 has traditionally been viewed as the smaller chip to the larger x10 or x00 dies that traditionally power flagships. Due to this, don’t expect Pascal to surpass the 980Ti by any large amount. Today’s news also furthers that impression. By splitting GP104 into 3 SKUs, we can expect performance between the 3 cards to be pretty close. It wouldn’t make sense to have so many close performing cards to the flagship which suggests that GP104 won’t be real flagship material.

By slipping GP104 into 3 SKUs, we will likely run into the same situation as the GTX 560Ti 448/570/580 and the 660Ti/670/680. If we take our past experience with those cards as the guideline, we can expect differentiation, not just on the core but the memory bandwidth as well. This makes the previous rumours about the GTX 1070 using GDDR5 while the GTX 1080 will use faster GDDR5X. The 1060Ti as I am calling it may feature either a gimped 192bit bus or the same situation faced by the GTX 970 with a section of VRAM being slower.

Right now, all we have to differentiate the 3 SKUs are the model numbers, the GTX 1080 will be GP104-400-A1, the GTX 1070 GP104-200-A1, and the 1060Ti will be using the GP104-150-A1. It will be interesting to see how Nvidia will differentiate the cards and how they compete against current Maxwell models. Computex can’t come soon enough!