The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 & GTX 1070 Founders Editions Review: Kicking Off the FinFET Generation
by Ryan Smith on July 20, 2016 8:45 AM ESTRise of the Tomb Raider
Starting things off in our benchmark suite is the built-in benchmark for Rise of the Tomb Raider, the latest iteration in the long-running action-adventure gaming series. One of the unique aspects of this benchmark is that it’s actually the average of 4 sub-benchmarks that fly through different environments, which keeps the benchmark from being too weighted towards a GPU’s performance characteristics under any one scene.
To kick things off then, while I picked the benchmark order before collecting the performance results, it’s neat that Rise of the Tomb Raider ends up being a fairly consistent representation of how the various video cards compare to each other. The end result, as you might expect, puts the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 solidly in the lead. And truthfully there’s no reason for it to be anything but this; NVIDIA does not face any competition from AMD at the high-end at this point, so the two GP104 cards are going to be unrivaled. It’s not a question of who wins, but by how much.
Overall we find the GTX 1080 ahead of its predecessor, the GTX 980, by anywhere between 60% and 78%, with the lead increasing with the resolution. The GTX 1070’s lead isn’t quite as significant though, ranging from 53% to 60#. This is consistent with the fact that the GTX 1070 is specified to trail the GTX 1080 by more than we saw with the 980/970 in 2014, which means that in general the GTX 1070 won’t see quite as much uplift.
What we do get however is confirmation that the GTX 1070FE is a GTX 980 Ti and more. The performance of what was NVIDIA’s $650 flagship can now be had in a card that costs $450, and with any luck will get cheaper still as supplies improve. For 1440p gamers this should hit a good spot in terms of performance.
Otherwise when it comes to 4K gaming, NVIDIA has made a lot of progress thanks to GTX 1080, but even their latest and greatest card isn’t quite going to crack 60fps here. We haven’t yet escaped having to made quality tradeoffs for 4K at this time, and it’s likely that future games will drive that point home even more.
Finally, 1080p is admittedly here largely for the sake of including much older cards like the GTX 680, to show what kind of progress NVIDIA has made since their first 28nm high-end card. The result? A 4.25x performance increase over the GTX 680.
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eddman - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
That puts a lid on the comments that Pascal is basically a Maxwell die-shrink. It's obviously based on Maxwell but the addition of dynamic load balancing and preemption clearly elevates it to a higher level.Still, seeing that using async with Pascal doesn't seem to be as effective as GCN, the question is how much of a role will it play in DX12 games in the next 2 years. Obviously async isn't be-all and end-all when it comes to performance but can Pascal keep up as a whole going forward or not.
I suppose we won't know until more DX12 are out that are also optimized properly for Pascal.
javishd - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Overwatch is extremely popular right now, it deserves to be a staple in gaming benchmarks.jardows2 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Except that it really is designed as an e-sport style game, and can run very well with low-end hardware, so isn't really needed for reviewing flagship cards. In other words, if your primary desire is to find a card that will run Overwatch well, you won't be looking at spending $200-$700 for the new video cards coming out.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
And this is why I really wish Overwatch was more demanding on GPUs. I'd love to use it and DOTA 2, but 100fps at 4K doesn't tell us much of use about the architecture of these high-end cards.Scali - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Thanks for the excellent write-up, Ryan!Especially the parts on asynchronous compute and pre-emption were very thorough.
A lot of nonsense was being spread about nVidia's alleged inability to do async compute in DX12, especially after Time Spy was released, and actually showed gains from using multiple queues.
Your article answers all the criticism, and proves the nay-sayers wrong.
Some of them went so far in their claims that they said nVidia could not even do graphics and compute at the same time. Even Maxwell v2 could do that.
I would say you have written the definitive article on this matter.
The_Assimilator - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Sadly that won't stop the clueless AMD fanboys from continuing to harp on that NVIDIA "doesn't have async compute" or that it "doesn't work". You've gotta feel for them though, NVIDIA's poor performance in a single tech demo... written with assistance from AMD... is really all the red camp has to go on. Because they sure as hell can't compete in terms of performance, or power usage, or cooler design, or adhering to electrical specifications...tipoo - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Pretty sure critique was of Maxwell. Pascals async was widely advertised. It's them saying "don't worry, Maxwell can do it" to questions about it not having it, and then when Pascal is released, saying "oh yeah, performance would have tanked with it on Maxwell", that bugs people as it shouldScali - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Nope, a lot of critique on Time Spy was specifically *because* Pascal got gains from the async render path. People said nVidia couldn't do it, so FutureMark must be cheating/bribed.darkchazz - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
It won't matter much though because they won't read anything in this article or Futuremark's statement on Async use in Time Spy.And they will keep linking some forum posts that claim nvidia does not support Async Compute.
Nothing will change their minds that it is a rigged benchmark and the developers got bribed by nvidia.
Scali - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
Yea, not even this official AMD post will: http://radeon.com/radeon-wins-3dmark-dx12/