Nvidia Geforce “Pascal” GTX 1080 will be launched at the end of May

A new generation of graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia is approaching and there is much to suggest that it will be the biggest shift in four years. The reason is attributed to new architectures and not least a transition from 28 nanometers to “FinFET” technologies, where so-called 3D transistors and smaller geometries enable significantly more advanced and not least energy-efficient circuits.

While much so far has pointed to the launches being delayed until the second half of the year, Benchlife now writes that Nvidia Pascal can find out much earlier than that. According to the report, Nvidia’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, will announce architecture-based products in April at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC).

The information further indicates that the first wave of Pascal products are not aimed at the top segment and will not use the HBM2 memory technology. Instead, the first circuit to see the light of day will be the GP104, a direct replacement for the GM204 used in the Geforce GTX 970 and GTX 980.

Instead of HBM2, the GP104-based graphics cards will use either GDDR5 or GDDR5X, which will offer speeds of up to 14 Gbps – twice the GDDR5 memory of 7 Gbps used with the Geforce GTX 970 and GTX 980. With a memory bus of 256 bits, this gives a bandwidth of 448 GB / s, a bit below the Radeon Fury X (512 GB / s) and above the Geforce GTX 980 Ti (336 GB / s).

Furthermore, the Geforce GTX 1080 is said to have four video connections in the form of two Displayports, an HDMI and a DVI. Extra power supply is supplied by an 8-pin PCI Express, which speaks for a maximum power of 225 W. According to the same report, the launch will take place on May 27, shortly before Computex 2016 kicks off.