The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 has a lot to offer to its fans and it has a lot to live up to, its predecessor. According to the statistics from Valves Steam gaming service, the 970 is still running on one in 20 PCs around the world.

The card is not just a large improving on the 970, it can also go toe to toe with the Nvidia 980 Ti.

Using the 1070, we realize that the Pascal architecture plays a huge role. Before Pascal, the previous architecture for Nvidia’s was the Maxwell GPU architecture. The 1070 gets better by having a much smaller manufacturing process, reducing the chip’s fabrication nodes to 16nm from 28nm, which is a huge difference!

The Pascal architecture allows Nvidia to place more transistors on a much smaller surface of silicon. This boosts up the performance and at the same time takes on less power to almost 150W.

Because of its Pascal architecture, Nvidia has been able to fit 1,920 CUDA cores inside 1070, the GPU’s foot soldiers that make the majority of the computational heavy lifting possible. This is one of the most prominent improvements on the Nvidia’s GTX 970 card which had 1,664 CUDA cores.

Pascal also takes in a mix Nvidia answer to the asynchronous computing. AMD uses Async technology which makes the GPU work on computing tasks and graphics at the same time, which makes the card work even faster. The answer to that by Nvidia is known as “pre-emption”, it works a little different. It helps the GPU choose which process to prioritize by having a much smarter approach. Most of the games still use APIs that don’t even know about async or pre-emption so technology for them matters the least. But we are still using DirectX 12 and Vulkan, which means that the tech is going to be very important in the near future.

Nvidia’s boosted the 1070’s speed to 1,506MHz, which again is a significant improvement on the 970’s 1,050MHz core clock speed; the 1080 clocks in at a slightly higher 1,607MHz
GDDR5X memory is a new generation of RAM that’s much faster, but it’s also more expensive than GDDR5. The tech means the 1080’s 8GB of GDDR5X memory had a clock speed of 10,000MHz.

You can’t be too disappointed with the lack of GDDR5X memory when you see the competitive price of the 1070. A card with 8GB of GDDR5 memory, which has a 256-bit bus for 256GB/sec of memory bandwidth is going to meet the requirements of almost all of the games.

It’s a huge mark of improvement on the 970, which lacked memory and was a constant problem for the gamers. It had a more modest 4GB of GDDR5 memory, only 3.5GB of which was generally usable for the majority of the time. This made 4K gaming on it a pipe dream and 1440p a serious push.