A couple of weeks back, at a packed event in Austin, Texas filled with tech press and attendees from the DreamHack gaming event that took place up the road, NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun-Huang unveiled the company's newest graphics cards, the GeForce GTX 1080 and GeForce GTX 1070. These latest flagships represent a true generational leap in performance and efficiency, thanks to NVIDIA's new Pascal GPU architecture at their core and the bleeding-edge 16nm FinFET + VLSI manufacturing processes used to produce the chips. For the last few years, virtually all of the discrete GPUs being produced used a 28nm process.

Mr. Huang made some lofty claims in regards to the GeForce GTX 1080's efficiency and performance, and unveiled a number of new, interesting features as well, which worked the crowd up at the event into a frenzy. On site demos of the GTX 1080 were equally impressive. When we left the event, we couldn't wait to get our hands on a card to evaluate its power and performance for ourselves. Thankfully, it wasn't long until we had a GeForce GTX 1080 in hand. And today, 10 days before they are due to hit store shelves, we?re able to give you the full scoop...