Is that the official explanation by the cdc ? <| sep |> Between each generation 980 vs 1080 for instance there will be usually either one of two things happening a die shrink or an architecture improvement . Architecture improvements simply mean that they can optimize and improve upon the chip design . For instance for Maxwell the codename for the GTX 900 series of cards they created a lossless memory compression system that allowed them to get more bandwidth through the onboard memory to the chip , a major factor in GPU performance . A die is the actual chip itself . In this picture you see a die in the very center surrounded by the substrate spreads out the pins wires so that you can solder them onto the circuit board 06 . jpgSome times they ' ll be a silver looking plate over the die , this isn ' t the chip itself but a heat spreader . This exists on some designs to increase the surface area to improve heat dissipation . Here an intel chip with and without the heatspreader a die shrink they cram in more transistors tiny electronic switches in the same space . Sometimes this means they literally make the die smaller , hence the shrink , or they keep it the same or similar size and add more transistors , making it faster for the same power consumption . For various reasons , consumer GPUs don ' t usually exceed 250 watts of power usage at full load and CPUs at 130 W with rare exceptions This is known as TDP Thermal Design Power and is a big thing to look at when buying a CPU or GPU as it gauges how much cooling and power supply you will need . So for some generations they will do a die shrink and not much else , others they will do a architecture improvement . Sometimes they will do both , like Pascal from Nvidia GTX 1000 series . Chip design is incredibly complicated and they are constantly coming up with new and more efficient ways to run things in the chip . They are in fact going to be relying on this more and more as die shrinks get harder to accomplish . For some chips we are about to be below 10 nanometers per transistor , which is so small it ' s approaching the size of atoms and actually running into the limits of our current understanding of physics . Literally nanotechnology . Before we started to run into this limit the process of constantly increasing the number of transistors in any given area was known as Moore ' s Law ' slawHere ' s a good video on how fabs chip manufacturing plants work , from GlobalFoundries , the fab company jointly owned by AMD and the government of Dubai UvluuAIiA 50 When chips are made there ' s considerable variation between the chips , just as the nature of manufacturing . Kind of like cooking , no one item is identical . So they will start off with a bunch of silicon wafers and then cut away at it with light to make a specific model of chip . For this example let ' s use the GP 104 chip see here for a list of Pascal arch chips microarchitecture # Chips . The GP 104 is used in the GTX 1070 and 1080 . So they will make a bunch of these chips , and then send them off to the testing area of the fab where they ' re very heavily tested to see how well they perform . A minority of them will perform very well , and will be programmed as 1080 s , and put on 1080 boards for sale . Some of them will perform well but not as well to sell them as a 1080 , so they will be sold as 1070 s . Some will perform poorly or not at all and they will be trashed . This is a result of the impurities that are innate to chip manufacturing . The silicon impurities determine what the final chip is capable of . The chip has a yield rate that the company watches very closely . The lower the yield rate , the higher the cost of the GPU and thus the video card for the customer . This is because many attempts are made and much material is wasted trying to make a chip that works up to standard or even works at all . For the very big die chips , like the GTX Titan X Pascal GP 102 , the yield rates will be low . Perhaps as low as 20 %. This is where a lot of the cost comes from in the higher performing chips . It ' s a lot harder to get such a large piece of silicon fabricated with few enough impurities to get it to work properly . This yield rate is the reason why you see so many different cards . A lot of GTX 1070 s are GP 104 ' s that couldn ' t pull their weight enough to be 1080 s . But another side of this is economics . The GTX 1080 is a very expensive card . Most people simply will not pay that much for a card . So some 1080 s , even though they pass testing , will be cannibalized and sold as a 1070 to meet market demand . Otherwise they don ' t get sold , and it ' s wasted effort . This is one of the reasons why you can overclock . The product you may end up with might have been a higher grade product that was classed as a lower product for economic reasons , but is capable of better than it was sold as . It used to be that you could actually modify the software on the card using special tools VBIOS editorsflashers to make a lower card think it was a higher card of the same chip design . This is much less common nowadays though as manufacturers noticed people were doing this and usually will cut the chip at the nanoscopic level so that you can ' t do this . I did this once with a HD 6950 from AMD . For the 2 GB versions of that card , they used the same chip VBIOS software on the video card board itself that controls it as the higher end and more expensive 6970 . With the right tools you could flash overwrite the VBIOS on the board with the 6970 VBIOS to make it think it was a 6970 it would even show up as one to the computer . This unlocked the extra shaders the 6970 had resulting in a free 13 % performance boost . Don ' t expect this though , this is a rare case and as far as I know NO cards from Nvidia have allowed this for years . The company will see or estimate the yield rates for a chip . Then they will estimate what price they need to set sometimes adjusting the price afterwards to sell all the chips they can practically make , for the highest price they can get of course . The other difference in card price is the market psychology of it . The people who will buy the more expensive cards will typically pay MUCH higher prices for the cream of the crop cards as I did . This means that usually the price to performance ratio is best around $ 250 , and drops of drastically the higher you go . This is why the Titan X Pascal is $ 1300 . They don ' t make very many to begin with due to the shit yield inherent on such a large die and the people that are willing to buy one will drop BIG money on it to get the VERY best . There are also some price differences from some subvendors for the SAME card . Subvendors are the companies that NvidiaAMD use to actually make the boards . NvidiaAMD design and make the chips , then sell them to the subvendors also called addin board partners or AIB , who make the board that they go on and sell them . NvidiaAMD make a reference design , which is the standard design , that they provide to the subvendors to provide standard performance . The subvendorsAIBs can then either use that board or make their own nonreference design . This design may be better OR WORSE than the original board . Typically they are better , with improved cooling , or power delivery , or memory amounts . Some subvendors utilize product binning . Here as they get shipments from the manufacturer of the chip , they thoroughly test them to see what clock rate speed , effectively that they can perform at reliably . Then they will sell them under certain higher prices . For instance for the GTX 1080 , one AIB , EVGA , sells 3 different grades . The standard , the lowest grade , the improved grade , marketed as FTW , and the top grade , marketed as CLASSIFIED . These cards demand an additional price premium even though they ' re the same chip underneath , because they are capable of overclocking better . When you hear people talking online about ASIC quality , that ' s what it ' s referring to . This is a measurement in a tool called GPUZ that tries to test the card to estimate what the quality of the silicon is . Contrary to popular belief this ISN ' T always accurate though . This variance in chip quality and thus overclocking ability is what ' s called the silicon lottery . As far as the difference in models is concerned , it varies generation to generation . Usually a Ti suffix denotes the higher end variant for that same chip although not always , the GTX 1050 is very odd and surprised a lot of people in that the Ti uses a DIFFERENT chip entirely it uses a different memory controller . I keep up with the market so much at least for Nvidia , I don ' t do AMD cards right now that I know what each chip is capable of . Generally I will look at benchmarks online to see what I can expect out of each card . Anandtech has one of the best systems for this For instance here ' s the GTX 1060 and 1070 compared 1771 Why the information jackpot ? 1 . You asked good questions 2 . I was bored .