For starters, the mention of the GTX 1080 Ti card is located in the “Targeted Spot Prizes To Drive Sentiment, Reward Behavior, and Grow Advocates” section. It falls under the GeForce Experience umbrella, and indicates that the pre-order and “Step Up” offers will only apply to users of GeForce Experience and GeForce Forum members.
“I think of GFE Rewards as more than giveaways — it’s a club with exclusive benefits for GFE users,” the job description states. “Through the Club we can help improve our customer’s gaming experience and build a GeForce/GFE community.”
The listing says that “Club GeForce” will provide three classes of rewards for GeForce Experience users. Participants in this “club” will receive benefits like a free, full copy of an exclusive Indie game once per year, a free custom skin or in-game item for AAA games once per quarter, exclusive hardware discounts, and exclusive access to The Talos Principle and first-party content from Nvidia.
Club GeForce will provide weekly benefits as well, such as free AAA game codes, in-game currency, and early beta access to AAA games. The job listing also indicates that Nvidia will hand out free VR headsets, Shield devices, keyboards, and other devices each week. Tickets to Blizzcon, PAX, and other gaming events are part of the weekly giveaways as well.
Club GeForce will provide benefits outside the GeForce Experience envelope, too. GeForce Forum members enlisted in Club GeForce will rise in rank and earn badges. There will even be early registrations and invitations to Club GeForce Meetups, community events, and LAN events.
Once Nvidia gets Club GeForce rolling along for a while, the company will introduce an “Elite” tier for $10 per month. This subscription-based platform will include “GeForce PC” cloud storage, and rotating bundles of free games within the GeForce Experience app store, totaling four new titles each quarter. Elite subscribers will also receive exclusive in-game items, skins, and Ge-Force based gear.
Rumors of a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti surfaced around September, claiming that the card will make its appearance during CES 2017 at the beginning of January. It will reportedly be based on Nvidia’s GP102 graphics chip to provide the same performance the refreshed Titan X currently offers at a hefty $1,200, only at a lower price point. The supposed hardware specs include 3,328 CUDA cores, 12GB of GDDR5X memory, and a boost clock speed of 1,623MHz.
Here are the rumored specs compared to the original GTX 1080:
| GTX 1080 Ti | GTX 1080 | |
| Process: | 16nm | 16nm |
| Transistors: | 12 billion | 7.2 billion |
| CUDA cores: | 3,328 | 2,560 |
| Base clock speed: | 1,503MHz | 1,607MHz |
| Boost clock speed: | 1,623MHz | 1,730MHz |
| Memory: | 12GB GDDR5X | 8GB GDDR5X |
| Memory Speed: | 10Gb per second | 10Gb per second |
| Memory interface: | 384-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory bandwidth: | 480GB per second | 320GB per second |
| Compute performance: | 10.8 TFLOPS | 9 TFLOPS |
| TDP: | 250 watts | 180 watts |
Given that Nvidia listed the GTX 1080 TI card in its job offering, we expect to see the card in a matter of weeks at the CES 2017 convention.
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