Nvidia's latest offers low-cost, high-power boost to virtual reality

In the age of mobile everything, a sexy, new PC graphics card struggles to find the proper acknowledgement from mainstream users. But even if you haven't installed a graphics card in years (or ever), Nvidia's latest, the GeForce GTX 1080, is worth paying attention to.

Why? Because it promises to deliver a huge performance boost to one of the hottest new areas of computing: virtual reality.

"Our first Pascal gaming GPU, the GeForce GTX 1080, enables incredible realism in gaming and deeply immersive VR experiences, with dramatically improved performance and efficiency," Jeff Fisher, senior vice president of Nvidia's PC business, said in a statement released on the company's website on Friday. "It's the most powerful gaming GPU ever built, and some of our finest work."

Part of the reason the graphics card has so many insiders excited is that it offers two times the performance in virtual reality at hundreds of dollars less than the previous top tier option — just $599 versus the GeForce GTX Titan X at $999. 

The card even got a ringing endorsement from the company behind VR gaming favorite EVE: Valkyrie. "GeForce GTX 1080 promises to be the ultimate graphics card for experiencing EVE: Valkyrie," Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP Games, said in a statement provided by Nvidia.  

"We took scenes from our Paragon game cinematics that were designed to be rendered offline, and rendered them in real time on GTX 1080," Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, said in a statement. "It's mind-blowing and we can't wait to see what developers create ... in the world of games, automotive design, or architectural visualization — for both 2D screens and for VR."