AUSTIN, Texas—After numerous rumours and a supposed “several billion dollars” spent on R&D, Nvidia’s first consumer graphics cards based on its Pascal architecture are here: the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. The GTX 1080 will retail for $ 599 (~£450), $ 50 more than the GTX 980 cost at launch, while the GTX 1070 will retail for $ 379 (~£270), again $ 50 more than the previous generation card. The 1080 launches on May 27, with the 1070 following on June 10.

While it’s surprising Nvidia has raised the price of its flagships graphics cards—particularly given AMD’s bold claims that its Polaris architecture will offer VR-ready performance at a “mainstream” price point—the company claims that both cards are significantly faster than its current flagships, the GTX Titan X and GTX 980 Ti, which retail for $ 1000 (£800) and $ 650 (£550) respectively. In the case of the GTX 1080, Nvidia claims it’s twice as fast as the Titan X and three times as energy efficient—it even says it’s faster than dual-SLI 980 setup.

The performance boost comes from the combination of a new GPU microarchitecture (Pascal) with a leaner TSMC 16nm FinFET manufacturing process. The GTX 1080 also makes use of faster Micron GDDR5X memory, resulting in an impressive 10Gbps memory clock. Meanwhile, the GTX 1070 will use standard GDDR5 memory.