What exactly is pascal?

[Cvdasfg]

I've seen a lot of people say wait until pascal comes out. I know its a line of graphics cards but what exactly does that mean? Is it going to be better in everyway then current gen stuff ( 980ti titanx) or is it going to be like skylake where if you bought the enthusiast grade stuff ( x99 ) its still worse? Date of releasish?

[LeapFrogMasterRace]

No one knows except nvidia 

[byalexandr]

It's Nvidia's next generation of GPU products. They outperform the last (which is the current, Maxwell) generation, and according to rumors they are going to outperform significantly more than previous generations have done. In recent times it was Fermi, then Kepler, then Maxwell, and now it's going to be Pascal, and after that it's Volta (at least according to Nvidia's roadmap). It's too far to tell what's after that.

[LancerBG]

it's just hype is all. 

[Naeaes]

Pascal is the working title for the next generation of Nvidia GPU architecture. Same as Maxwell if for the current GTX9xx and so on. It'll be better. But how much, time will tell. Also the prices can go either way. It'll come out in 2016. I'm guessing during the summer like the few last releases have.

[Ryoutarou97]

Pascal is the next GPU architecture from NVidia. It will be 16nm Finfet+ I believe while this gen is 28nm. Also, it will have HBM 2 so lots of high bandwidth memory. Like all GPU generations, we can expect it to be an improvement over the last one. It happens each year. The 780ti used to be the top tier card then maxwell came and now it's the 980ti. That was basically what happened here (well, except iirc kepler was 28nm too, so no shrink between those generations and kepler didn't use a new type of memory.) AMD will do the same with their 400 series/ Arctic Island GPUs later in 2016.  It should significantly outperform this gen. Why are you saying x99 is worse? For gaming? It's not like that because it's going to cover the entire product range, so the 960 will be replaced with a card of the same/similar (launch) price called the 1060 (or something like that, nomenclature unknown) which will outperform it. and 970/1070 etc.

 

TL;DR:

Pascal is next gen which will make current gen last gen. Nailed it.

[Starelementpoke]

It's a kinda paste like caviar. Expensive for some reason and not really worth it unless you like the taste. 

[Thylbanus]

What is rumored, much of that was covered by Ryoutarou97, plus the new architecture could have a top level of 16 GB vRAM and possibly 32 GB with a bandwidth of 1TB/s.

 

Again, this is rumor.  All of it is in doubt, but don't doubt that most of it is correct.

[Shakaza]

Pascal is the graphics architecture by NVIDIA that is slated to be the successor to the current generation, Maxwell. It will be NVIDIA's first series using 16 nm FinFet+, a step down from the current 28 nm. This will allow for far greater performance in the same power envelope(250-300 watts maximum), and at least the high-end cards will utilize HBM 2, a generally superior replacement for the now widely-used GDDR5, which will offer memory bandwidths of 1 TB/s or above. Also, memory capacities are rumored to be 16 GB or above. These features, combined with the fact that NVIDIA will presumably give the series full DirectX 12 capabilities make me really excited for it. This is the first die shrink GPU cores have had in years, so my hope is that the performance gains are significant. I imagine NVIDIA will also optimize the architecture for DirectX 12 like Maxwell is for DirectX 11. What I mean by that is that Maxwell had greater performance than Kepler(series before Maxwell) whilst having fewer CUDA cores, but didn't perform exceptionally well in DirectX 12 compared to their AMD counterparts. Since DirectX 12 will probably mark the transition of graphics rendering to compute, NVIDIA won't gimp the compute performance of Pascal like they did with Maxwell.

[ivan134]

I've seen a lot of people say wait until pascal comes out. I know its a line of graphics cards but what exactly does that mean? Is it going to be better in everyway then current gen stuff ( 980ti titanx) or is it going to be like skylake where if you bought the enthusiast grade stuff ( x99 ) its still worse? Date of releasish?

It's basically Maxwell + compute with HBM2 on 16 nm.