NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and AMD Radeon RX Vega comparison: how do the price and specifications square up?

NVIDIA has consistently been grabbing the bigger market share in terms of graphics processing unit (GPU) for quite some time. Just recently, the company launched its newest high-tier GPU called the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. However, AMD is also gearing up to launch the AMD Radeon RX Vega soon. Will the latter be able to compete with the former's specifications?

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti comes with almost the same features as the NVIDIA Titan X, except for some enhancements. For one, the newest GPU's GP102 core architecture has been reduced to GP100, indicating that 28 of the 30 streaming multiprocessors are functional. This means that both the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and the Titan X have 3,548 compute unified device architecture (CUDA) codes.

The GeForce FTX 1080 Ti GPU from NVIDIA.NVIDIA

On the other hand, the new GPU is clocked with 63 MHz higher than the GTX Titan at 1,480 MHz. This means that the clock speed of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti can go up to 1,582 MHz, about 51 MHz higher than the previous GPU.

Aside from these, the newest GPU also comes with 11 GB of GDDR5X video random-access memory (VRAM). It also comes with an enhanced power rating of 20 watts at 11.5 teraflops.

However, despite the improvements in the new NVIDIA GPU, there are speculations that AMD's Radeon RX Vega may still have better performance of about 20 to 45 percent.

In a benchmark test, it reveals that the AMD Radeon RX Vega comes with 8 GB of high bandwidth memory 2 (HBM2) at 2048-bit memory configuration. This means that two HBM2 stacks process with 4 GB each at 1024-bit. Aside from this, the test hints that the AMD GPU will come with 4096 stream processors, higher and faster than the new NVIDIA GPU. The AMD Radeon RX Vega is also expected to come with 12 teraflops.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is priced at $699, while AMD is yet to confirm the price of Radeon RX Vega.

If the AMD Radeon RX Vega proves to have better performance than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and can be sold at a lower price, it is possible that buyers may opt for the AMD GPU instead.