On May 17th Nvidia rolled out the GeForce GTX 1080, the new flagship graphics card. Alongside of that product release Nvidia silently announced the GeForce GTX 1070 as well. However the specs release have been rather limited. Today however we can post and host the review of the reference card (these days called founders edition). Though from a visual perspective the two cards might look identical, there are a number changes alright. In this review we'll talk you through it all.

It's been a long time coming, but the day is finally here! The two major desktop dedicated GPU manufacturers both are close slash ready for the newest GPUs. It's been a time long coming and not without reason. The graphics card industry, or the GPU industry has been on hold, waiting for a smaller GPU fabrication process to become viable. Last generation GPUs were based on a 28 nm fabrication, an intermediate move to 20 nm was supposed to be the answer for today's GPUs, but it was a problematic technology. Aside from some smaller ASICs the 20 nm node has been a fail. Therefore the industry had to wait until an ever newer and smaller fabrication process was available in order to shrink the die which allows for less voltage usage in the chips, less transistor gate leakage and, obviously, more transistors in a GPU. The answer was to be found in the recent 14/15/16 nm fabrication processors and processes with the now all too familiar FinFET + VLSI technology (basically wings on a transistor). Intel has been using it for a while, and now both Nvidia and AMD are moving towards such nodes as well. Nvidia is the first to announce their new products based on a TSMC 16 nm process fab by introducing Pascal GPU architecture, named after the mathematician much like Kepler, Maxwell and Fermi.