Nvidia unveiled its GeForce GTX 1080 TI graphics chip as its latest product for high-end gaming machines.
Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang made the announcement this evening in a webcast.
“Today we’re announcing something really, really important,” Huang said.
Nvidia competes head-to-head with Advanced Micro Devices, which is preparing to come out with its Vega graphics architecture in the first half of 2017. Nvidia also competes with Intel, which integrates both graphics and processors on a single chip.
The new Nvidia chip is based on the Pascal architecture, which is the basic foundation for many different versions of a graphics chip. The GeForce GTX 1080 TI is 35 percent faster than the GeForce GTX 1080 chip introduced last year.
Speaking at the Game Developers Conference this evening in San Francisco, Huang said it was the company’s fastest gaming graphics processing unit (GPU) ever.
The chip comes with 11GB of GDDR5X memory. GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards will be available worldwide beginning March 10, starting at $699.
The company today also announced GameWorks DX12, a collection of resources for game developers that will increase realism and shorten product cycles in titles designed using DirectX 12, Microsoft’s API that unifies graphics and simulation.
