NVIDIA reserved some prime middle of the night time to officially announce the rumored GTX 1000 series of GPUs based on their new Pascal architecture, saying GTX 1080 graphics cards are launching this month and 1070 cards will come next month. A post on the GeForce website has a trailer and all the details on the 1080, calling it "the world's fastest and most advanced graphics card, as they say it will outperform a Titan X or two GTX 980s in SLI. They also tout new technology to make VR processing more efficient and to create more realistic perspectives in multi-monitor configurations, and this video "shows what Pascal can do for VR." They also invoke Ansel Adams in unveiling NVIDIA Ansel, a new approach to screenshots that they liken to "game photography." Here's word:

The GeForce GTX 1080 is a quantum leap in performance. Faster than both the GeForce GTX 980 Ti and GeForce GTX TITAN X, the GeForce GTX 1080 is built with the very latest technology to deliver unprecedented performance and efficiency, giving gamers the horsepower to play the newest games with settings maxed out. Whether they’re on your monitor or in Virtual Reality.

These gains in performance and power efficiency are enabled by the marvels of the Pascal architecture. The first of these marvels is the introduction of cutting-edge 16nm FinFET chip construction. This new, smaller chip design uses fewer Watts of power and emits less heat, enabling us to crank up the core clock speed of the GPU, which is key for increasing a graphics card's performance.

Alongside the GeForce GTX 1080’s powerful 16nm FinFET chip is 8GB of GDDR5X memory, a new, faster type of video card memory. This cutting-edge and blazing fast, High Bandwidth memory ensures performance won’t be bottlenecked by memory-related operations in the most demanding games.

Surrounding the GeForce GTX 1080's powerful hardware is a redesigned vapor chamber and fan for cool, quiet operation; a polygonal shroud, and a backplate for the dissipation of heat from the rear of the graphics card. This premium design enables excellent overclocking and whisper-quiet operation, a trend we began with previous-generation NVIDIA GeForce GTX GPUs.