NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti release date news 2016: GPU is a toned down Titan X? Hitting store shelves in January?

NVIDIA's next gaming graphics card, which is said to be a bare-bones version of the pricey and powerful Titan X, could be unveiled in January 2017.

Last month, NVIDIA announced that Jen-Hsun Huang, the company's co-founder and CEO, would give the pre-show keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the global consumer electronics and consumer technology trade show held every January in Las Vegas, Nevada. This is going to be NVIDIA's first CES keynote and Huang is expected to announce groundbreaking news in the areas of gaming, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and self-driving cars.

He is also expected to take the opportunity to unveil the new NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti.

While NVIDIA has not officially announced the specs for the NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti, reports indicated that it is faster than the 1080 and that it is patterned after a Titan X. While the $1,200 Titan X, the top-ranked GPU in NVIDIA's lineup, is indeed powerful, there are those who have been waiting for a cheaper option. The NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti is said to be designed to cater to gamers who want the performance of the Titan X but are looking for a more affordable GPU.

According to WCCFTech, while the GTX 1080 Ti offers the same performance as the Titan X, its GPU and CUDA cores were pared down. Compared to its more high-end counterparts, the upcoming GPU only has 3,328 CUDA cores and a GP102 GPU. The number of CUDA cores were reportedly reduced because a high CUDA core count would not have been in proportion to the available resources in the graphics card. Fewer CUDA cores mean that the GTX 1080 Ti gets more performance per CUDA core.

WCCFTech also notes that while the Titan X has 224 TMUs, the GTX 1080 Ti only has 208. The leaked specs indicate that the GPU has 208 texture mapping units, a base clock of 1,503 mHz, and 160 render outputs.

NVIDIA has not announced the official release date for the GTX 1080 Ti.