Apart from the recent unveiling of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, the company has also announced other tricks up its sleeve, including a significant price reduction for the GeForce GTX 1080, now down to $499.
Nvidia Slashes GTX 1080 Price
The GTX 1080 was released a while back, retailing for $599 when it was launched in May. Since then, prices have rarely hovered far away from the suggested retail price. This means that the significant price reductions could very well signal significant impact on card prices moving forward.
Along with the price cuts, Nvidia has also confirmed the price points for the Founder's Edition, or FE, cards, according to AnandTech, with the GTX 1080 FE coming in at $549, which essentially sees the the FE premium reduced to $50. The GTX 1070 FE similarly gets a $50 price cut, making it only $399.
Nvidia Now Allows Partners To Sell Factory Overclocked Cards
More notably, Nvidia also announced that its partners will start selling GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1060 6 GB with upgraded memory. Partners will have the option to equip Nvidia's cards with 11 Gbps GDDR5X for the GTX 1080 and 9 Gbps GDDR5 for the GTX 1060, which will be sold as factory overclocked cards.
The cards' specifications, however, aren't changing at all. Nvidia is just letting partners have the option to purchase higher-speed memory from it to be used in the cards. The resulting products will, as previously mentioned, be sold as factory overclocked cards, which essentially gifts Nvidia's partners added configuration options.
Nvidia's partners haven't been able to squeeze more power out of the GTX 10-series cards, as their designs already push memory speeds to the limit, PCWorld notes. This should also have an immediate impact in the real world, much like the price drops. This could also provide headroom for partners to offset the price drops and charge more for factory overclocked cards. It's a win-win for both parties, in short.
The price cuts are also very encouraging news for gamers looking for a decent, high-end gaming card but don't have the luxury of shelling out $700 for a GTX 1080 Ti.
The announcement of the price drops and overclocking options was part of Nvidia's "GeForce GTX Gaming Celebration" at this year's recently concluded Game Developers Conference, where it also announced the GTX 1080 Ti, a 4K-capable graphics card that outperforms the expensive Titan X card for just $699.
Other Nvidia News
In other, more recent Nvidia news, the company unveiled the Jetson TX2, a credit card-sized supercomputer that can perform twice as fast as its predecessor and power factory robots, smart cameras, and commercial drones.
The Jetson 3.0 platform was developed for artificial intelligence for edge-of-network devices, in place of cloud-based platforms. It essentially renders the Jetson TX2 as more capable of pushing edge-of-network computing to greater lengths, which also allows it to run distributed neural networks directly on edge devices for more accurate AI-powered actions, such as object recognition in images, speech recognition, and environmental interpretation for purposes of automated driving.
Thoughts about the price cuts? Feel free to sound off in the comments section below!
