Great News For PC Gamers; NVIDIA Slashes $100 In GeForce GTX 1080 Now With Faster GDDR5X Memory

NVIDIA kicked off its GDC event by reducing the prices of the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 as it aims to reach a wider range of gamers by allowing those with fewer resources access to high-end cards. Moreover, NVIDIA partners will now be selling GeForce GTX 10 Series with updated memory architecture meaning faster GDDR5X memory and new overclocking options.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 was launched last year with a retail price of $599, which has remained unchanged until now. With the coming of the fastest card in the GPU market, gamers were expecting a $10 or $20 price cut to the high-end card that has proven its great performance value since day one. It came as a big surprise then when NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang started the "Ultimate GeForce" event with an announcement of a major price cut for the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070.

NVIDIA in GDC announced a sizeable price cut of up to $100 for the GeForce GTX 1080, now selling at only $499. This is great news for PC gamers especially for those who are looking for a high-end card but do not have the means to buy it. Meanwhile, the GTX 1070, which is a favorite among gamers for its impressive value to performance ratio now retails at $349 from its original price of $379.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 is a powerful card featuring the GP104 GPU core with 2,560 CUDA cores. Using the FinFET architecture, the card will have notable improvement in clock frequency base. The card clocks in at 2.1GHz on just air cooling according to wccftech. Its actual clock speeds are consistent at 1607MHz base with a boost to 1733MHz. However, NVIDIA's FinFET technology now pushes for extreme overclocking as can be seen in GDC demos.

NVIDIA also equipped the GeForce GTX 1080 with 8GB of GDDR5X memory featured in all its 256-bit bus. Other than price cuts, the card also has a faster GDDR5X memory from the updated memory architecture. It is now capable of clocking at 11Gbps and delivering bandwidth of 352 GB/s, which is a marked improvement from previous 320 GB/s. The GTX 1060 will also have faster memory on all models and will clock at 9Gbps as compared to previous 8Gbps.

NVIDIA partners like Asus, EVGA, Zotac and the likes now have the option to sell the GTX 10-series cards with faster memory and as factory overclocked cards, PC World reported. In the past, partners could not squeeze more from the cards since these were designed with memory speeds pushed to their limits. OEMs may now have the option to charge more or even ship hardware with higher clock speed.