Video cards are oddly large and weird-looking. The GTX 1080, Nvidia's latest and greatest, is a $700 bulging hunk of steel and silicon that measures almost a foot long and weighs more than three pounds. You'd be forgiven for mistaking the beast for a late '80s stealth bomber. It's a delicate, pugnacious monster.
It is also an unprecedented piece of electronic precision—one that requires a full-size, gaming-ready desktop PC to house it, but which performs Herculean feats of computational strength once installed. My testing had the brute crunching through 4K video, perfectly rendering demanding games ranging from 2007's Crysis to Mirror's Edge Catalyst. The former is a notoriously challenging title even today, and the latter is a gorgeous, parkour-inspired odyssey through an Orwellian police state. The 1080 never faltered and rendered everything perfectly.
Stepping into VR, I trekked through the Himalayas, painted the air in Google's Tilt Brush, and even dipped into The Funhouse, Nvidia's VR tech demo. Each brought to life in stunning veracity and rendered with exacting detail. And it proved, without a doubt that these pixel-pushers had done it—for those with the cash, VR is now attainable.
Before my upgrade to the 1080, I was running the company previous high-end card, the GTX 980. While a stunning chip in its own right, hitches and stutters in virtual reality were common—especially for some of the more advanced games, like the 3D cyberpunk Galaga game, Space Pirate Trainer. I realized then that while HTC and Oculus had managed to make the VR headsets consumer friendly, raw computing power still wasn't quite on par with VR's ludicrous demands.
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has gone on the record saying designers should strive to push 90 frames per second or higher to these headsets. Anything less is still perceptible to the human brain, especially when the display is so close to the eyes. Higher rendering speeds on your average 2D game are only of concern to fiddly obsessives eager to claim bragging rights. In VR, however, jumpy screens can confuse the brain, causing "simulator sickness," an especially pernicious nausea.
With the 1080 and its lighter cousin the $450 1070, Nvidia has committed itself to its new strategy—chasing VR performance. And for now, I can't see the need for any more power. The company nailed these two chips out of the gate, providing seamless excellence on its first earnest shot at VR-ready cards.
Plus, it's brought a host of extraordinary features. Nvidia's Ansel, for example, lets players pause a game anywhere and give them complete control over the camera. With it, you can take the perfect screenshot and apply a bevy of filters, a la Instagram. Right now, it only works with Mirror's Edge Catalyst. But several more games, including The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, will be added in the coming months.
The hope here is that you'll finally have the tools to document your digital adventures. Like Ansel Adams, for whom the software is named, you'll be able to take just about any shot you can imagine. An entire subculture has already grown up around artfully framed video game screenshots—spearheaded by blogs like DeadEndThrills. Now that Facebook and other social media outlets are supporting 360-degree and VR photos, Nvidia believes that Ansel, and its related software, will make it easier to share what it's like to be in the face of Skyrim's dragons, or to stand at the edge of a skyscraper that you climbed in-game. It blurs the border between our "real" and digital lives.
