According to details provided by Nvidia, the company will allow its AIC partners to purchase 11Gbps GDDR5X memory chips for the GTX 1080 and 9Gbps GDDR5 memory chips for the GTX 1060, which is a minor improvement from earlier available 10Gbps GDDR5X and 8Gbps GDDR5 memory chips.

Nvidia was also quite keen to note that this does not change the official specifications of these two graphics cards and that these will be sold as custom, factory-overclocked versions. Nvidia offers its partners several choices, including GPU, GPU and RAM or a complete package with PCB, which is usually known as the reference version.

Some factory-overclocked GTX 1080 and GTX 1060 graphics cards have been already capable of hitting these frequencies, with additional user overclock, but now it will give Nvidia AIC partners a bit more breathing room, allowing them to push for even higher factory-overclock, at least on the memory side.

In any case, this will put a bit more pressure on AMD's current lineup as well as any future graphics cards and it will be interesting to see how will Nvidia AIC partners differentiate the new versions from ones already available on the market.