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 ESTThe Division
The final first person shooter in our benchmark suite, The Division is a multiplayer-only game powered by Ubisoft’s Snowdrop engine. The game’s design focuses on detailed urban environments and utilizes dynamic global illumination for parts of its lighting. For our testing we use the game’s built-in benchmark, which cycles through a number of scenes/areas of the game.
As a bit of an unknown when it comes to engines, we went ahead and benchmarked this game at 4K with both Ultra and High settings, to see how performance was impacted by reducing the image quality. The result is that even at High quality, the GTX 1080 isn’t going to be able to hit 60fps. When it comes to The Division and 4K, your options are to either put up with a framerate in the mid-40s or make greater image quality sacrifices. That said, the GTX 1080 does get the distinction of being the only card to even crack 40fps at 4K; the GTX 1070 isn’t doing much better than 30fps.
More than anything else, this game is unexpectedly sensitive to the differences between the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. Normally the GTX 1080 would lead by 25% or so, but in The Division that’s a 33% to 40% lead. It’s more than you’d expect given the differences between the two cards’ configurations, and while I suspect it’s a combination of memory bandwidth differences and ALU throughput differences, I’m also not 100% convinced it’s not a bug of some kind. So we’ll have to see if this changes at all.
In any case, the more significant gap between the Pascal cards means that while GTX 1080 is comfortably leading, this is one of the only cases where GTX 1070 isn’t at least at parity with GTX 980 Ti. The gap closes with the resolution, but at all points GTX 1070 comes up short. It’s not a total wash for the GTX 1070 since it’s both significantly cheaper and significantly more energy efficient than GTX 980 Ti, but it’s very rare for the card not to be hanging relatively close to GTX 1080.
Looking at the generational differences, GTX 1080 enjoys a solid lead over GTX 980. With the exception of 1440p, it improves on its direct predecessor by 60% or more. Meanwhile GTX 1070, despite its greater handicap, is a consistent 50%+ faster than GTX 970.
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DonMiguel85 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Agreed. They'll likely be much more power-hungry, but I believe it's definitely doable. At the very least it'll probably be similar to Fury X Vs. GTX 980sonicmerlin - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
The 1070 is as fast as the 980 ti. The 1060 is as fast as a 980. The 1080 is much faster than a 980 ti. Every card jumped up two tiers in performance from the previous gen. That's "standard" to you?Kvaern1 - Sunday, July 24, 2016 - link
I don't think there's much evidence pointing in the direction of GCN 4 blowing Pascal out of the water.Sadly, AMD needs a win but I don't see it coming. Budgets matter.
watzupken - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Brilliant review. Thanks for the in depth review. This is late, but the analysis is its strength and value add worth waiting for.ptown16 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
This review was a L O N G time coming, but gotta admit, excellent as always. This was the ONLY Pascal review to acknowledge and significantly include Kepler cards in the benchmarks and some comments. It makes sense to bench GK104 and analyze generational improvements since Kepler debuted 28nm and Pascal has finally ushered in the first node shrink since then. I guessed Anandtech would be the only site to do so, and looks like that's exactly what happened. Looking forward to the upcoming Polaris review!DonMiguel85 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
I do still wonder if Kepler's poor performance nowadays is largely due to neglected driver optimizations or just plain old/inefficient architecture. If it's the latter, it's really pretty bad with modern game workloads.ptown16 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
It may be a little of the latter, but Kepler was pretty amazing at launch. I suspect driver neglect though, seeing as how Kepler performance got notably WORSE soon after Maxwell. It's also interesting to see how the comparable GCN cards of that time, which were often slower than the Kepler competition, are now significantly faster.DonMiguel85 - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Yeah, and a GTX 960 often beats a GTX 680 or 770 in many newer games. Sometimes it's even pretty close to a 780.hansmuff - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
This is the one issue that has me wavering for the next card. My AMD cards, the last one being a 5850, have always lasted longer than my NV cards; of course at the expense of slower game fixes/ready drivers.So far so good with a 1.5yrs old 970, but I'm keeping a close eye on it. I'm looking forward to what VEGA brings.
ptown16 - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Yeah I'd keep an eye on it. My 770 can still play new games, albeit at lowered quality settings. The one hope for the 970 and other Maxwell cards is that Pascal is so similar. The only times I see performance taking a big hit would be newer games using asynchronous workloads, since Maxwell is poorly prepared to handle that. Otherwise maybe Maxwell cards will last much longer than Kepler. That said, I'm having second thoughts on the 1070 and curious to see what AMD can offer in the $300-$400 price range.