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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Robalov - Tuesday, July 26, 2016 - link
Feels like it took 2 years longer than normal for this review :Dextide - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
The venn diagram is wrong -- for GP104 it says 1:64 speed for FP16 -- it is actually 1:1 for FP16 (ie same speed as FP32) (NOTE: GP100 has 2:1 FP16 -- meaning FP16 is twice as fast as FP32)extide - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
EDIT: I might be incorrect about this actually as I have seen information claiming both .. weird.mxthunder - Friday, July 29, 2016 - link
its really driving me nuts that a 780 was used instead of a 780ti.yhselp - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Have I understood correctly that Pascal offers a 20% increase in memory bandwidth from delta color compression over Maxwell? As in a total average of 45% over Kepler just from color compression?flexy - Sunday, September 4, 2016 - link
Sorry, late comment. I just read about GPU Boost 3.0 and this is AWESOME. What they did, is expose what previously was only doable with bios modding - eg assigning the CLK bins different voltages. The problem with overclocking Kepler/Maxwell was NOT so much that you got stuck with the "lowest" overclock as the article says, but that simply adding a FIXED amount of clocks across the entire range of clocks, as you would do with Afterburner etc. where you simply add, say +120 to the core. What happened here is that you may be "stable" at the max overclock (CLK bin), but since you added more CLKs to EVERY clock bin, the assigned voltages (in the BIOS) for each bin might not be sufficient. Say you have CLK bin 63 which is set to 1304Mhz in a stock bios. Now you use Afterburner and add 150 Mhz, now all of a sudden this bin amounts to 1454Mhz BUT STILL at the same voltage as before, which is too low for 1454Mhz. You had to manually edit the table in the BIOS to shift clocks around, especially since not all Maxwell cards allowed adding voltage via software.Ether.86 - Tuesday, November 1, 2016 - link
Astonishing review. That's the way Anandtech should be not like the mobile section which sucks...Warsun - Tuesday, January 17, 2017 - link
Yeah looking at the bottom here.The GTX 1070 is on the same level as a single 480 4GB card.So that graph is wrong.http://www.hwcompare.com/30889/geforce-gtx-1070-vs...
Remember this is from GPU-Z based on hardware specs.No amount of configurations in the Drivers changes this.They either screwed up i am calling shenanigans.
marceloamaral - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
Nice Ryan Smith! But, my question is, is it truly possible to share the GPU with different workloads in the P100? I've read in the NVIDIA manual that "The GPU has a time sliced scheduler to schedule work from work queues belonging to different CUDA contexts. Work launched to the compute engine from work queues belonging to different CUDA contexts cannot execute concurrently."marceloamaral - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
Nice Ryan Smith! But, my question is, is it truly possible to share the GPU with different workloads in the P100? I've read in the NVIDIA manual that "The GPU has a time sliced scheduler to schedule work from work queues belonging to different CUDA contexts. Work launched to the compute engine from work queues belonging to different CUDA contexts cannot execute concurrently."