But what's interesting is that the Pascal GP104 GPU 'only' has 7.6 billion transistors, which is a far cry from the 15.3 billion used in the larger Pascal GP100. With substantially improved performance and efficiency relative to even the best Maxwell GPUs, this is a beast of a card. Nvidia boldly proclaims the GTX 1080 as the 'New King' of gaming, and based on the information presented there's little reason to doubt that's the case.

As with the past several generations of reference designs, the GTX 1080 reference model uses a blower fan instead of an open air cooler, which can be particularly useful for SLI configurations as well as compact ITX builds. It has a vapor chamber to aid in cooling, and Nvidia has added some extra geometric designs to the cooling shroud. The main cooler has also been updated, though here it mostly looks like a case of aesthetics rather than any major overhaul of the cooler. If you recall that card, there was a portion of the backplate that you could remove to improve cooling in SLI configuration it appears the back half of the 1080 backplate can be removed in a similar manner, as there are five small screws holding in that portion of the backplate. The reference GTX 1080 also brings back the fully shielded backplate, similar to the reference GTX 980.

It has a new customized SLI connector, though it's probably just for show. Nvidia had a whole bunch of systems on display after the main presentation, including the above swanky 1080 SLI setup. and pay attention to the seam in the backplate on the GTX 1080.

Nvidia gtx 1080 fp64 performance