NVIDIA Showcased Pascal HBM Graphics Card in Japan

NVIDIA’s upcoming Pascal launch is hotly anticipated as the company transfers from GDDR5 to High Bandwidth Memory on a 16nm manufacturing process. The performance increase from Maxwell is predicted to be quite substantial compared to previous generation graphic card launches and it will be interesting to see NVIDIA’s first HBM-powered GPU.

Unlike AMD’s Fiji line-up, the 2nd generation HBM chips allow for increased memory capacity. Apparently, NVIDIA’s top-tier gaming chip will feature 16GB HBM2 while the compute card utilizes 32GB. This is a staggering increase from the 6GB on the GTX 980Ti or 12GB on the Titan X. The graphics card opts for a 4096-bit memory interface, DirectX 12 functionality and contains around 17 billion transistors.

The GPU’s core has been teased at GTC 2015 in Japan and looks pretty similar to earlier announcements. Clearly, with the new manufacturing process and move to HBM2, Pascal is the most important release for over a decade. HBM revision 1 has been somewhat plagued by supply chain issues but this should be resolved by the time for Pascal’s release in 2016. HBM2 is a major step up, but consumers should expect a very hefty price tag for NVIDIA’s truly next-generation chip.

Thank you TweakTown for providing us with this information.