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 ESTDiRT Rally
For the racing game in our benchmark suite we have Codemasters’ DiRT Rally. Codemasters continues to set the bar for graphical fidelity in racing games, delivering realistic looking environments with layered with additional graphical effects. Based on their in-house EGO engine, DiRT Rally includes a number of DirectCompute based compute shader effects, and while it’s not the most punishing game in our suite, it still takes a very good card to sustain the 60fps frame rate that driving games are best played at.
Once again, the GTX 1080 is uncontested. Better still, it can crack 60fps at 4K, so gamers there won’t need to make any tradeoffs. And 1440p gamers with high refresh rate monitors should find that the card can come reasonably close to their refresh rate limit.
GTX 1070 is in turn solidly in second place, coming in around 4% ahead of the GTX 980 Ti. However because it’s targeting a level of performance only slightly ahead of the best of the last generation cards, we do see the 28nm Radeon Fury X hang on decently well at 4K, before the GTX 1070 pulls farther ahead at lower resolutions.
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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/