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 ESTGPU 2016 Benchmark Suite & The Test
As this is the first high-end card release for 2016, we have gone ahead and updated our video card benchmarking suite. Unfortunately Broadwell-E launched just a bit too late for this review, so we’ll have to hold off on updating the underlying platform to Intel’s latest and greatest for a little while longer yet.
For the 2016 suite we have retained Grand Theft Auto V, Battlefield 4, and of course, Crysis 3. Joining these games are 6 new games: Rise of the Tomb Raider, DiRT Rally, Ashes of the Singularity, The Witcher 3, The Division, and the 2016 rendition of Hitman.
| AnandTech GPU Bench 2016 Game List | ||||
| Game | Genre | API(s) | ||
| Rise of the Tomb Raider | Action | DX11 | ||
| DiRT Rally | Racing | DX11 | ||
| Ashes of the Singularity | RTS | DX12 | ||
| Battlefield 4 | FPS | DX11 | ||
| Crysis 3 | FPS | DX11 | ||
| The Witcher 3 | RPG | DX11 | ||
| The Division | FPS | DX11 | ||
| Grand Theft Auto V | Action/Open World | DX11 | ||
| Hitman (2016) | Action/Stealth | DX11 + DX12 | ||
As was the case in 2015, the API used will be based on the best API available for a given card. Rise of the Tomb Raider and Hitman both support DirectX 11 + DirectX 12; in the case of Tomb Raider the DX12 path was until last week a regression – a new patch changed things too late for this article – and meanwhile the best API for Hitman depends on whether we’re looking at an AMD or NVIDIA card. For now Tomb Raider is benchmarked using DX11 and Hitman on both DX11 and DX12. Meanwhile Ashes of the Singularity is essentially tailor made for DirectX 12, as the first DX12 game to be designed for it as opposed to porting over a DX11 engine, so it is being run under DX12 at all times.
Meanwhile from a design standpoint our benchmark settings remain unchanged. For lower-end cards we’ll look at 1080p at various quality settings when practical, and for high-end cards we’ll be looking at 1080p and above at the highest quality settings.
The Test
As for our hardware testbed, it remains unchanged from 2015, being composed of an overclocked Core i7-4960X housed in an NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition case.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 AMD Radeon RX 480 AMD Radeon Fury X AMD Radeon R9 Nano AMD Radeon R9 390X AMD Radeon R9 390 AMD Radeon HD 7970 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 368.39 AMD Radeon Software Crimson 16.7.1 (RX 480) AMD Radeon Software Crimson 16.6.2 (All Others) |
| OS: | Windows 10 Pro |
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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/