It's weird, but that's human nature I guess.

I have a GTX 1070 mostly for deep learning, but I have to admit that piece of hardware was pleasing the casual gamer in me as well. It's only about 20% behind a GTX 1080 for gaming, a $500 GPU. Twice more than I had ever spent for leisure as a gamer.

Well on my 4K display, I can push most pre-2014 games to 60 fps, but that's it. After that, for most AAA games, I have to resort to 1440p + some AA. And if I was really into gaming I'd have bought an ultrawide 1440p/144Hz monitor, no doubt about it, knowing pretty well I'd need a Titan XP or at least 1080 to see these framerates on newer titles.

It's a space that's moving fast, both on the interface (monitor, VR...) and processing side (Nvidia makes a 20-30% leap each gen, kind of insane compared to Intel CPU gens for instance). We're only beginning to touch low-level APIs once again after a two-decades hiatus on the PC (DirectX being both great to make it easy to create 3D apps but at the cost of much performance/overhead, which DX12 is trying to address).

I'm jaded about CPUs, honestly Ryzen is much welcome economically but nothing to be enthused as a nerd/engineer, however GPUs and display technology is where it's at these days. Can't wait for proper AR too (HoloLens-like technology, still a few gens away from a commercially viable product).

For an example, take the latest Deus Ex: http://www.techspot.com/review/1235-deus-ex-mankind-divided-.... It is also a good example for the next statement: The heaviest games don't even get 60 FPS on 1440p, on Ultra the average with a GTX 1080 is 43. 4K is at 24, basically unplayable. Even if you were to use SLI, which is by now pretty much agreed upon to be more a hassle than worth it, it wouldn't be at 60 FPS. And that disregards that 2x1080 are/were 200% the price of a single GTX 1080 Ti, and won't be close to getting 200% the performance.

You can see that as you want, but I can pretty much guarantee that gamers, at least the segment of gamers that would even consider investing hat much into a gpu, will absolutely sprint to get a GTX 1080 Ti, if the performance increase is real. They need it for VR + 4K, or at the very least believe so.

The best part is, in two years (or four) when you buy a better card, all the titles that are currently new will tend to look about as good as 2-year-old titles look now. ;)

I've crunched the numbers and the 1080TI will essentially offer the 980 SLI performance at its best - and that's before the extra RAM and Pascal features come into play - as well as the reduced heat levels etc.

So count me in, especially when Vega comes out and presses the prices further south. (Alas my monitor uses GSync, so that won't be an option for me.)

FWIW I'd like to mention that the 34" screen is completely brilliant for programming (Visual Studio), which is what I use the setup for most of the time.

You can't get any games above like 30 fps on 4K monitors even without maxing out graphics options on a $350 card today. Add multiple monitors... slows to a crawl. You can hear the fans working to keep up with non-gaming tasks...

While I do feel like noticeable CPU performance enhancements have mostly plateaued, I think we are 4-5 years away from affordable and good 4K graphics cards. The choices on the market at present aren't all that amazing. You either pay a lot for meh, or a fortune for acceptable.

Nothing on the market today is like, "OMG it handles anything we throw at it without breaking a sweat..." And that's fine... it's usually 2-3 years after a game comes out that I can run it at max settings.

4k@60 gaming on a single card is an excellent goal. I'm running a single 1080 for this purpose at the moment and on many games it struggles and I have to reduce options significantly.

The 1080Ti should be performant enough to run 4k@60FPS on most games on a single card. The 1080 was close, running ~45-50 FPS, but this should push it over that edge.

Then there are the people who want 4k@144 and stuff who'll be running 2 of these in no time and still not getting the numbers they want...

Hopefully within a few iterations 4k@60 will get down to an affordable level. I just really want to go back to buying $300-500 cards instead of $1k cards and this means we're on the way.

Second, it's all about pixel count. While 4k is still miles ahead of even the 3440x1440 ultra-wide resolution, that resolution represents nearly as big a jump in pixel count as the jump from 1080p to 1440p.

The goal is 4k at a minimum of 60fps. Consistent 100 hz or even 144hz on an ultra-wide 3440x1440 monitor represents a solid step in that direction.

With a 1060, when I really started gaming, it was pretty hard to have very good settings and get 60fps. Overwatch on Ultra ran at about 50fps (100% render scale), GTA 5 on the "nvidia optimized" settings was almost always 60fps but would drop down to 30fps sometimes. With a 1080, everything is always 60fps, even on Epic with some modifications (fog distance I think has the biggest effect). My attempt to max out the settings to just get 60fps has led to slow framerates (30-40) during hero selection and the "play of the game" intros, though. Only sometimes, it's very strange. (With the nvidia-optimized settings, this doesn't happen, though. But the graphics aren't quite as good in-game.)

Overall you should basically be able to pick any GPU and play any game at 4k. I would like to get another monitor for 1080p/1440p at 144Hz, but don't have anywhere to put it, so 4k@60 is enough for me. IPS panels are nice for everything except gaming, so I live with the compromise when playing games. Screen refresh rate is not the limiting factor in my ability, not by a long shot.

Try Battlefield 1, or some other last-gen game (I believe Rise Of The Tomb Rider is also in this category). You won't get 4k60 on that one without a Titan X or a 1080 Ti.

That is, with the image quality settings maxed out, of course.

Get a grip man. GPUs are not struggling. People are just demanding a lot from them because reasons.

I find it useful to multiply resolution with refresh rate to arrive at a number that indicates the number of pixels being pushed per second:

  1920x1080 x60  =   124,416,000
  2560x1440 x60  =   221,184,000
  3440x1440 x60  =   297,216,000
  3440x1440 x100 =   495,360,000 
  3840x2160 x60  =   497,664,000
  2560x1440 x144 =   530,841,600
  3840x2160 x144 = 1,194,393,600

Edit: And then you start seeing 144hz 4k screens; you will still find yourself wanting with a single 1080TI.

As for traditional usecases, I have a 3x monitor setup ( 2K@144Hz/4K@60Hz/2K@144Hz) and my 1080 GTX can't max out everything smoothly while I stream/record high-end games.

I would love it if all this was just vanity, but its my job. This stuff is an expense I'd happily avoid if possible. I don't own any nonsensical RGB lighted cases or non-essential peripherals.

That being said I have some trouble going back to my 1200p screens at work after being used to 4k at home. Surprisingly even for emacs and other work-related things 4K makes a pretty huge difference in my experience. Everything remains razor sharp even with a small font. I can split my screen and display a few full page datasheets and schematics alongside my code. No need to zoom in or anything. No aliasing, no pixels, I find it very relaxing.

I don't have very good screenshots available at the moment unfortunately but this should give you an idea of what's possible:

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/10059888168078...

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/10059888168007...

Here's Dark Souls III which looks pretty great at 4K but unfortunately doesn't manage to run at a solid 60FPS on my GTX 1080:

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/84843325410407...

And here's an older game, The Witcher:

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/84843969116367...

Those hold up pretty well at 4K. In contrast I present to you Wolfenstein: The New Order which often looks very mediocre and yet manages to run worse than DOOM:

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/10059888168132...

Note the low polygon count on some of the models and the very low resolution of certain textures.

World of Warcraft: Everything looks the same, except text is prettier, item textures are more detailed, and spell icons suddenly have noticeable details. ("Hey that's a guy with a shield! I never noticed that!")

Dishonored, or other FPS-es: Far-away details suddenly are not lost in the haze of antialiasing. Wires and greebling on bridges are visible, and Look Good. HUDs and ammo displays seem to universally SUCK -- they are often not scaled in older games.

All the face textures in most older games end up supporting the higher detail textures, but it gets closer to the uncanny valley. (I notice this a lot in bioshock infinite.) I haven't re-played Wolfenstein.

It's much like looking at the same picture or webpage on a retina screen vs a non-retina screen. Text looks better, some other things look much the same. Anything vector-based (HUDs, etc) might look better.

Also, VR gaming can never have enough GPU power, because supersampling increases the fidelity by a lot (first hand experience)

You literally just argued why it is demonstrably true. If a Titan X, Ti, or standard 1080 can get to 4K 60 on max then buying an Titan X or Ti is nothing more than bragging rights.

Nobody is arguing that the Ti isn't more powerful, just that that power likely doesn't buy you anything specific, all you've done is show how that is true.

Most of them upgraded from the two earlier series, because to get 1440p gaming on the new 144Mhz monitors and with high settings on modern games you really need these new cards.

I had similar thoughts to your own re: the hype, until I saw the games. They are amazing - and I find VR boring after 10 minutes.

Both the games that are designed for the higher resolution, as well as the games that 'scale up' (can't recall which was which) are amazing. It's a completely different gaming experience and I understand now how people become obsessed with frame rates, specs, cards, the unveils, the news and rumors etc.

I was so close to pulling the trigger myself even though I don't have a PC. I could probably justify the $500 + $500 for card and monitor on an existing PC (or a Mac upgrade clears throat) but not an entirely new machine to play games.

If you haven't seen cutting edge PC gaming go and check it out somewhere or somehow. There was this entire revolution happening that I knew nothing about.

I also partly think this is cultural, as the original commenter noted.

Last year shortly after Overwatch came out I built a new gaming PC, featuring an i5 6600K, GTX 980Ti, and 27" 1080p 144Hz monitor. My buddies gave me some flack for it because even at the time (~June 2016) these were not the top of the line options. Nevermind the fact that even with all settings on Ultra I was able to consistently get 120-140 FPS, and with settings turned down to their most basic (a common practice among competitive gamers to decrease input latency) I never dropped below 144, even in the middle of the most dense game play.

Granted, I'm playing at 1080p, but I have yet to find a reason to want more than that, and the performance is where I want it to be, so I'm satisfied. Still, since I didn't trade hundreds of extra dollars for an i7 and a GTX 1080 I'm the noob.

> Granted, I'm playing at 1080p, but I have yet to find a reason to want more than that, and the performance is where I want it to be, so I'm satisfied. Still, since I didn't trade hundreds of extra dollars for an i7 and a GTX 1080 I'm the noob.

So what you're saying is that you find a value in playing at 144Hz over 60Hz, but object to people finding value in playing at a higher resolution? Someone else might argue that you paying to play at 144Hz is only cultural, while you know it's not.

Except I didn't object to anything. Me calling the wants and needs of the high performance PC culture "cultural" is not me being dismissive of what they happen to enjoy. Buy whatever you want. My whole point was that you can still have a professional quality (as in eSports level) experience with equipment that's not super-ultra-top-of-the-line-fantastic, saving you the super-ultra-top-of-the-line-fantastic premiums.

I'm not sure I understand. In this area (as opposed to functional clothing etc) it's very easy to measure real differences between a GTX 1070 and a 1080, and seeing pixels on more than 1080p when the screen is 27" and up.

That you can get a rags-to-riches story in eSports learning to play on a 5 year old computer is very true, but it doesn't detract from the fact that it's easier with better hardware.

If you don't feel it's worth it it's not worth it for you, but the difference is very real.

You're part of the fringe, not the other way around.

I'm satisfied, so really it's not my problem; it's the problem of the hardware manufacturers and game developers to make better products and do a better job of convincing me that a higher resolution is something I need, and so far they haven't.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

https://developer.nvidia.com/academic_gpu_seeding

[0] Caveat: I only ever run a single monitor on my gaming rigs. [1] Turns out I get VR sickness something fierce, so VR won't really be a driving need for me.

I'm glad NVidia chose to canibalize that market rather than artificially constrain the consumer series.

Wasn't it Intel that did this with the Celeron's at some point to preserve the higher-end workstation market for performance? iirc they underclocked some processors that outside of L1/L2 cache weren't so different to the much more expensive Pentium 4/Xeon or whatever.

Yes, there are problems where squeezing in a slightly larger model than 11gb would give slightly better results; but that size of problem also would generally require a lot of computing power, at that point you're not comparing specs of a single card but benchmarks and scaling for clusters of multi-gpu machines.

Not in SLI, no. SLI is a technology to have two GPUs act as one, by syncing among themselves. When you have two GPUs in SLI, your CPU program will generally see them as a single GPU with (almost) twice as many cores and twice as much bandwidth, but the same amount of memory.

For this to work, the GPUs need to be very similar (i.e. you can't SLI a TitanX and a 1080).

You can, however, put many[1] different GPUs in the same system, and then the onus is on the CPU program to properly manage and send work to each one separately. This is not SLI.

Generally, SLI is useful for games where the program assumes "a GPU" and sends work to it, and you want to have more performance than your single card can provide. For compute/ML, you're much better off just using each card directly.

[1]: Don't quote me on this, but I believe up to 8x is supported, above that is uncharted territory.

- Is it possible, officially supported way, to have both GTX and Quadro at the same time in the machine? I prefer GTX for rendering speed (Redshift renderer), but I need 10-bit output Quadro has which GTX doesn't have.

- Are there GTX (1080 TI in this case) cards out there which don't take double PCI space? I don't need multiple outputs and I can hook them up to the water block, if needed. I need as many cards in a single workstation case as possible for rendering. I've seen people saw/solder off stuff from cards in order to get at that, but not something I would do personally. Ideally I would prefer to have eight 1080 TIs in a single machine along with a single (modest) Quadro for 10-bit output to three monitors - are there even motherboards that could support that?

Note that I'm looking for workstation / deskside solution, not server 747-fan-sound-behemoths.

I would like 12-bit output, but that's not possible due to limitations in X11.

Interesting that you mention this as I've been searching for an answer before I build a ML rig and embark on learning it. Is there any benefit for ML performance if I put a GTX 970 and a 1080[ti|x] in the same machine? Just trying to figure out how to re-use spare parts.

Both have max 32 PCI Express lanes - so you can theoretically hang max 2 PCIx x16 cards off each CPU, but as few of the lanes is reserved for other peripherals, in 4GPU/CPU setup they will practically run at lower speeds, ie 8/8/4/4. However, using system with PCIe root complex [1] can improve the GPU<->GPU communication speed.

[1] https://www.microway.com/hpc-tech-tips/pci-express-root-comp...

so GPUs get better bandwidth (P2P etc).

NVIDIA said the 10-series can only do dual-SLI at most (two cards), nothing more.

In cases where you want faster cross-card transfers and are willing to mess with HW configurations, there's NVLINK.

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVLink

PR piece: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/11/14/what-is-nvlink/