NVIDIA Volta GPU Features: Will NVIDIA Finally Beat AMD With New GPU?

By Vianne Ilagan, Christian Post Contributor Wednesday, March 22, 2017

After months of speculation about NVIDIA's next offering, the California-based tech company finally launched the new GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card at the recently concluded Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2017. Since its launch, tech enthusiasts have become so invested in the ongoing competition between NVIDIA's new graphics processing unit (GPU) and the ones from its toughest competitor in the market, AMD.

The months leading up to the release of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti were filled with never-ending assumptions about what NVIDIA had in the offing. With its official release, NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun-Huang finally put an end to these speculations, particularly when it comes to the new GPU's specs.

The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti features 3584 CUDA cores, 11 GB of GDDR5X random-access memory (RAM) and an impressive 12 billion transistors. It also boasts of a 35 percent performance boost compared with its predecessor, the GTX 1080.

One of the best things about the GTX 1080 Ti is its support for overclocking, which is one of the first and most important features that gamers look for in a GPU. Despite this feature, however, AMD is still ahead of NVIDIA when it comes to sales.

But the competition between NVIDIA and AMD is not over just yet. According to reports, NVIDIA will soon launch the Volta GPU in its bid to gain the attention that the GTX 1080 Ti has somewhat failed to gain. This new flagship will reportedly allow NVIDIA to finally get ahead of AMD.

The features of the upcoming NVIDIA Volta GPU include second-generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2) and the ability to deliver memory speeds up to 16 Gbps, which is significantly more powerful than GTX 1080 Ti's current 10 Gbps. The tech company will also manufacture the new GPU using the 12-nm process, making it difficult to fabricate its chips.

Recent reports say that NVIDIA's Volta GPU is now on its way to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC), which will manufacture the chips. Considering its architecture, the NVIDIA Volta is expected to gain the upper hand when pitted against AMD's Vega.