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 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).