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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TallestJon96 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Still Waiting on that 960 review :)All kidding aside I'm I'm sure Il'll enjoy this review. Probably buy a 1080 in 2-3 weeks
Sandcat - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Mea culpa.Armus19 - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Could you pretty please do the usual HTPC credentials test for 1070, 1080 and 1060 and RX 480 as well pretty please? Otherwise a great review.Xajel - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
I hope to add to this list a new revisit for Hardware Decoding+Encoding capabilities for these new GPU's in comparison to Intel QuickSync and pure Software solutions...JBVertexx - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
Still waiting..... I've been checking all afternoon.....JBVertexx - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
For the 1060 review, that is.....colinisation - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Lovely stuff as always chaps, to the complaints quality takes time.There goes my evening.
i4mt3hwin - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
"As of the time this paragraph was written, Newegg only has a single GTX 1080 in stock, a Founders Edition card at $499."Should be $699
osxandwindows - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Finally!jsntech - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Nice review.On page /30 (Power, Temp, etc.):
"...there is a real increate in power..."