Review roundup: NVIDIA's amazing new GTX 1080 graphics card

"If you're a gamer looking for something that will handle 4K gaming at nearly maxed out quality, the GTX 1080 is the card to get. Or if you want a GPU that has at least a reasonable chance of making use of a 1440p 144Hz G-Sync display, or a curved ultrawide 3440x1440 100Hz display, again: this is the card to get. It delivers everything Nvidia promised, and there's likely room for further improvements via driver updates—this is version 1.0 of the Pascal drivers, after all."

"I think it's safe to say that NVIDIA intends to start off the 16nm/14nm generation with a bang. As the first high-end card of this generation the GTX 1080 sets new marks for overall performance and for power efficiency, thanks to the combination of TSMC's 16nm FinFET process and NVIDIA's Pascal architecture. Translating this into numbers, at 4K we're looking at 30% performance gain versus the GTX 980 and a 70% performance gain over the GTX 980, amounting to a very significant jump in efficiency and performance over the Maxwell generation."

"If you have the cash, and need the most powerful video card on the market, you can't go wrong with the GTX 1080. It's built precisely for the things gamers are focused on today: 4K and VR. It's not just an incremental upgrade for NVIDIA: It's a dramatic leap forward."

"Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080 delivers incredible performance at a particularly opportune time. While the GeForce GTX 980 Ti and its principal competition, AMD's Radeon R9 Fury X, both achieve playable frame rates at 4K, they still force you to either compromise quality or add a second GPU for the kind of performance high-end gamers want to see."

"From our perspective, the big takeaway is this: Titan X and its cheaper GTX 980 Ti counterpart are still monstrously fast gaming GPUs. They're the cards we've gone to for testing when we need what seems like a bottomless pit of graphics power. If the upcoming GTX 1070 is priced correctly and offers equivalent performance, we're in for a real treat. But the GTX 1080 isn't just a little faster - it's a lot faster. And assuming its simultaneous multi-projection technology is indeed integrated into upcoming VR titles, the performance increase there could very well match the 2x Titan X claims that Nvidia made at its recent press event."

"And yet, the high-water mark by which we must judge the GTX 1080 is set by Nvidia. The 1080 is good value, because the Titan X and 980 Ti were so expensive to begin with. The performance gains are excellent, because there's no company around that can (currently) challenge them. For all the innovation that's been put into the 1080, for all the hard work that's gone into its design—and I don't doubt for a moment that a lot of hard work has been put into it—it's hard to shake the feeling that, if there were true competition at this level, we'd be looking at a very different product to kick off the 16nm generation."