NVIDIA is likely to unleash its next flagship graphics card, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, around early March 2017 or the actual release date coinciding with the PAX East gaming festival in Boston that kicks off March 10. As expected, the GTX 1080 Ti is lined up to collide head-on with AMD's upcoming Vega 10 GPU family, a new report said.
The Vega 10 GPUs are likely to hit the market June this year, according to WCCFTech, or a few months before the GTX 1080 Ti debut that is no later than March. The report added that an unidentified NVIDIA AIB employee leaked of the supposed plan to introduce the 16nm GTX 1080 Ti slightly ahead of the Vega GPU cards.
It appears that the NVIDIA game plan is to deliberately delay the upgrade of the GTX 1080 and allow the original card to slug it out with the Radeon RX 500 card series that likely will come out starting in February. The strategic push back will then allow the King of GPUs to further polish the GTX 1080 Ti, the report said.
More tweaks are expected to be applied on the GTX 1080 Ti so its immediate predecessor "can retain NVIDIA's performance crown once Vega hits the shelves and dethrones the GeForce GTX 1080," WCCFTech said.
Speculations are rife, and as seen with the Vega GPU demo at the recently concluded CES 2017, that Vega 10 has the capabilities to dethrone NVIDIA in performance and more so in pricing. As Vega GPU has been demoed to easily defeat the GTX 1080 and outsell it with a lower price point, it is highly likely that NVIDIA will see the need to make adjustments on the GTX 1080 Ti with utmost consideration of the two factors.
Rumors say AMD will release Vega 10 in dual-GPU that likely will match with performance tweaks on the GTX 1080 Ti. It remains to be seen, however, if NVIDIA will be willing to resort to price cuts or pull down below the $1000 mark so as to keep its market dominance.
WCCFTech said the GTX 1080 Ti will boast of the GP102-based core and loaded with at least 10GB of GDDR5X VRAM.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti on release date, according to TweakTown.com, will be available in all variants from day one, meaning GPU enthusiasts will be limited to the Founders Edition. The report added that the card is expected to fly off the shelves no matter the sticker price.