The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founder's Edition Review: Bigger Pascal for Better Performance
by Ryan Smith on March 9, 2017 9:00 AM ESTAshes of the Singularity
Sorely missing from our benchmark suite for quite some time have been RTSes, which don’t enjoy quite the popularity they once did. As a result Ashes holds a special place in our hearts, and that’s before we talk about the technical aspects. Based on developer Oxide Games’ Nitrous Engine, Ashes has been designed from the ground up for low-level APIs like DirectX 12. As a result of all of the games in our benchmark suite, this is the game making the best use of DirectX 12’s various features, from asynchronous compute to multi-threadeded work submission and high batch counts. What we see can’t be extrapolated to all DirectX 12 games, but it gives us a very interesting look at what we might expect in the future.
Of all of the games in our benchmark suite, Ashes is perhaps the most unusual. Besides being built for low-level APIs like DirectX 12 from the start, its rendering optimizations scale very well with resolution. As a result it takes a lot of rendering power to play Ashes with all the bells & whistles turned on, but once you can reach that point, going to 4K isn’t too much harder.
In any case, the GTX 1080 Ti becomes the first card to crack 60fps at 4K in this game. In doing so it’s 27% faster than the GTX 1080, and 71% faster than the GTX 980 Ti. Performance has actually reached a point that if we drop to 1440p, we start being CPU-limited a not-insignificant percentage of the time. So the GTX 1080 Ti outright needs 4K to really put its best foot forward.
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SaolDan - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
i dont need it but i really want it. currently gaming and vr on a 1070 and loving it.Endda - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
Would have loved to see the Titan XP in those graphsRyan Smith - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
Unfortunately NVIDIA never sampled us on that one, so I don't have one on-hand to test again.Samus - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
Can't wait to pickup one of these in a year for ~$400. Easily future-proof for the next generation of console games, and my 780Ti is really showing its age, by about 154%...Nfarce - Friday, March 10, 2017 - link
If you think you are going to see a 1080Ti in 12 months selling for $400, I've got a like-new Ferrari to selling you for $15k. It will be nearly summer before the AIB GPUs (ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, etc.) start becoming available in decent supply.rtho782 - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
I know I'm an outlier, but having lived with SLI 980s for a couple of years I'm looking to go back to a single card, and I really wish I could find SLI 980 to 1080ti benchmarks :PDrumsticks - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
I think the original AT review of the 1080 compares them. Go there and just tack on another 30% maybe?mapesdhs - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link
If it's of any help, I've done a fair few 980 SLI tests for 3DMark, Unigine, etc., you could compare those to 1080 Ti reviews (several sites have included 3DMark results, and Techpowerup has a couple of Unigine results threads/tables); PM me for links, or email (Google "Ian SGI", find the Contact page, use my Yahoo address).Achaios - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
It should be borne in mind that Benchmark results are misleading, especially when referring to the 780TI.The 780TI launched at ridiculously low clocks of 875MHz Core Clock and 928 MHz Boost Clock, which wasn't much different from what a GTX 580 OC'd could do.
When overclocked, the 780TI worked at around 1.25 GHz, a huge difference over the stock card.
So, while the 1080TI has got more than double the performance of an OC'd 780TI as per 3D Mark Firestrike, the performance shown herein for the 780TI is ridiculously low and thus, misleading.
Yojimbo - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
I guess if you're worried about someone making judgments of general GPU trends without fully researching it, that's true. But owners of 780 Ti cards should be aware of where their individual cards sit compared to the reference design. In any case it's always going to be hairy taking overclocking performance into account when making judgments about generational trends. For instance, 2017 1060s and 1080s are going to be able to overclock better than 2016 1060s and 1080s. There's also a whole range of clock speeds that come out. Do you take the fastest or the average? If you take the average do you take the average of the SKUs or an average weighted by units sold? It's not so easy to get an accurate picture without a lot of work.