Moments ago, American technology company NVIDIA, known best for their graphics processing units (GPUs) and system-on-a-chip (SoC) products, revealed the latest products in their new lineup of GeForce graphics cards based on their recent Pascal architecture, the 1000 series. Over 40,000 people tuned into the company’s Twitch channel to watch the stream live from DreamHack. So far, NVIDIA has only revealed Pascal-based cards in the Tesla lineup – and these are purely for calculations and rendering and do not have a video output.

Nvidia has announced the GTX 1080, and showed gameplay of new games like Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Tom Clancy’s The Division running at max settings, over 60 frames per second; and then they let through that it was running on the GTX 1080. Nvidia has called Pascal the largest processor architecture project “in the history of humanity”, claiming it took “7 years”, “thousands of people”, and $7 billion USD in R&D to create – they said that with that money they’re “pretty sure you could go to Mars.” The 16 nanometer manufacturing process will help for low-latency, high-performance gaming and more. They claim that a single GTX 1080 is faster than two 980 SLIs, and twice the performance and three times the energy efficiency of a single Titan X, saying that it’s “almost irresponsible amounts of performance.” They showed a real-time demonstration of the GTX 1080, running at 2.1 GHz on air cooling, keeping a 65-67 degrees Celsius. It has 8GB of G5x VRAM, 9 teraflops, and will cost $599 for the standard edition and $699 for the NVIDIA-designed Founders’ Edition. It will be available May 27th.

The GTX 1070 was also announced, with 8GB of G5 memory, 6.5 teraflops, $379 MSRP and $449 for the Founders’ Edition; also faster than a GTX Titan X.

They also announced Ansel, an advanced screenshotting utility that gives the user a free camera, 3D integration, and filters, all at the driver level for their screenshotting pleasure. They also give you the ability to use a cell phone and something like Google Cardboard for a cheap, low-cost virtual reality experience.

Futhermore, they announced some additions to their VRWorks API, including realistic water, ball-bouncing, falling, and other types of physics assisted by Nvidia PhysX and integrated with your haptic feedback controller. They also will be adding path traced audio, with advanced acoustic models – the world’s first real-time physics-based acoustics engine of this type. Usually, audio is directional / positional, but the environment will now be affected by the sound waves as they would realistically. They have found a way to calculate this efficiently, in real-time, on Nvidia GPUs.

To showcase these technologies, NVIDIA has created the NVIDIA VR FUNHOUSE, which will be available on Steam and open-source for users to tinker with and improve.

Furthermore, Simultaneous Multi-Display allows 16 viewpoints into the 3D world for a wide variety of display support, and improved Nvidia Surround. Previously, 3 cards would be needed for triple-monitor Surround without the side monitors being warped, but the new Pascal architecture GPUs can achieve this with a single GPU. Stereo 3D rendering is also possible in a single pass, improving performance for virtual reality solutions.

If you were looking at purchasing a GTX 970, 980, 980ti, or Titan X any time soon at full price, hold off; the wait will be worth it.