NVIDIA gave us a taste of its new Pascal architecture with the P100 graphics card last month, which is aimed at servers for heavy duty computing. Now, it’s ready to show off how that technology will be adapted for consumers with its new GeForce GTX 1080 GPU. As you’d expect, it’s fast: NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed that it’s better than its current performance king, the Titan X. It’s also faster than two GTX 980 cards running together using SLI technology. Like the P100, the 1080 is built with a new 16nm FinFET (a type of 3D transistor) manufacturing process, which makes it more power efficient, on top of just being faster. The GTX 1080 is the “largest GPU endeavor, largest chip endeavor, largest processor endeavor, in the history of humanity, ” said NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. He added that the R&D budget for the new card was “several billion dollars” over the span of more than two years. “I’m pretty sure you can go to Mars [for that], ” he said. NVIDIA is basically positioning the GTX 1080 as the gamer’s dream card. Prior to its unveiling, Huang showed off several new titles like The Division and Rise of the Tomb Raider running at max settings in a high resolution over 60 frames per second. He later revealed that all of the games were running on the new card, to the delight of the entire crowd. But of course, NVIDIA won’t be alone with new hardware this year. AMD is expected to debut new cards with its Polaris technology this summer, which will focus on power efficiency as well. It sounds like Polaris is better suited for gaming laptops at the moment, but it could also be a way for AMD to deliver some powerful cards that you can actually afford (think under $300). Developing…

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NVIDIA’s GTX 1080 GPU is twice as fast the Titan X