A rapid deterioration of Nvidia’s graphics card fortunes is putting a huge spanner in its efforts to launch more economical Pascal graphics cards, with just around 30 percent of its GTX 1070 cards sold out in the UK.
The Question Are Graphics Card plug and play? Many graphics card manufacturers manage to produce dedicated graphics cards for multiple market sectors. Nvidia, for example, has several variants of its GTX 1070 aimed at Gamers, prosumers, and those looking for VR functionality, with perhaps the most popular of the lot, the GTX 1070Ti, depending on the market sector.
However, although they are easily recognizable for their positioning, these graphics cards vary greatly. For example, Nvidia has a model with the GPU clock set at 1175MHz with an odd ‘log’ TDP of 165W and a sub-$300 price tag.
Meanwhile, one of Nvidia’s least expensive cards is the GTX 1060, which provides a clear and obvious competitor for the price-sensitive gamer market, offering a great range of gaming performance for just under £300.
Manufacturers also have multiple graphics cards designed for the Pro market, with the cheapest available, the Nvidia Quadro M1000M, costing a cool £869. One of Nvidia’s more powerful and certainly less value-oriented graphics cards, the Quadro P6000, costs just under £2000.
Are Graphics Card plug and play?
This all suggests that Nvidia is trying to target the lowest common denominator. The company’s Pascal architecture is a technology breakthrough when it comes to power efficiency, although it is not quite as powerful as Nvidia’s more recent desktop GPUs.
The unfortunate truth is that the GTX 1070 and 1060 aren’t in Nvidia’s sights, so Pascal won’t have any direct competition from these cards.
However, it’s easy to see that the market segment the cards were aimed at was simply over-saturated in Nvidia’s eyes and so the company has decided to concentrate on the GTX 1070/1060 price-to-performance ratio, hoping that the benefits of its impressive graphics technology are more appealing than the lower prices.
A confusing web of branding
How do the cards differ? The naming conventions for Nvidia’s various graphics cards are confusing at best. For example, the GeForce GTX 1070 is Nvidia’s most affordable option in the Pascal architecture, with the cheapest model costing just £290.
However, the fact that the name actually suggests that the card isn’t intended for serious gaming, means that anyone buying this graphics card is likely to purchase it for prosumer or professional use, rather than game performance.
The ‘GTX 1070’ name appears to have been chosen because it doesn’t appear to have an officially-recognized sub-name in the professional markets that Nvidia operates in.
In the meantime, Nvidia has quietly released an updated version of its ‘Founders Edition’ GTX 1070, with the nomenclature changing from ‘Founders Edition’ to just ‘GeForce GTX 1070’ and the price dropping to £350.
This new model doesn’t have the ludicrous TDP of the Founders Edition, nor does it feature the red shroud on the card.
Of course, many Nvidia cards in the past have had custom PCB designs with red PCBs and shrouds, so it’s easy to see why the company didn’t bother to change the branding.
This card has a more recent revision of its Pascal GPU, bringing more power efficiency gains, so we’d imagine that Nvidia wouldn’t want to confuse consumers by changing the name on an ‘improved’ card.
Are Graphics Card plug and play?
Meanwhile, the new GTX 1070-series cards are equipped with the new faster GDDR5X memory, designed to run faster and use less power than the GDDR5 memory.
Given that the GTX 1070 is already quite a good graphics card, this update may well be a good idea. But, the naming of Nvidia’s Pascal-powered products continues to be confusing, to the extent that people tend to call them Nvidia cards and not Pascal.
Should you buy a GeForce GTX 1070?
In our benchmark results, the GTX 1070 returned a 3DMark synthetic graphics score of 18,910, equivalent to around 98fps in many modern games. This is a pretty decent result considering that the card costs £350.
It’s not possible to directly compare this card with the AMD Vega 64. Which costs £500 and has four times the number of cores and eight times the number of ROPs.
As a result, Vega 64 is more suited for gaming at the moment. But Nvidia’s cards could offer good performance in years to come when the gaps between AMD and Nvidia GPUs become smaller. I try to explain to you Are Graphics Card plug and play?
GeForce GTX 1070 vs Vega 64
Although the GTX 1070 is fairly powerful, it’s really competing against the far more expensive Vega 64. So, a direct comparison between the two cards is difficult, as this is a two-way battle.
It’s worth mentioning that Vega 64 uses a cut-down variant of AMD’s Vega graphics chip. Which is also built on the Vega architecture.
This gives Vega 64 a substantial performance advantage over Vega 56, which was built using AMD’s latest Polaris GPU design. And we’ve seen a very fast Vega 56 already, with an AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 buying around $649.
A few points to bear in mind
The price of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1070 is pretty steep compared to the price of AMD’s rival Vega graphics cards. This is due to the fact that AMD’s Radeon Vega graphics cards come in the form of a single-GPU card. Unlike Nvidia’s two-GPU GTX 1070. Now, Are Graphics Card plug and play? is not difficult for you.
This means that Nvidia isn’t as confident as AMD in how much of a performance difference the RTX GPU architecture has over the GTX 1080 Ti. So the company’s graphics cards have the same $550 (£500) price tag.
Hope You know the answer Now: Are Graphics Card plug and play?
