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 ESTHitman
The final game in our 2016 benchmark suite is the 2016 edition of Hitman, the latest title in the stealth-action franchise. The game offers two rendering paths: DirectX 11 and DirectX 12, with the latter being the case of DirectX 12 being added after the fact. As with past Hitman games, the latest proves to have a good mix of scenery and high model counts to stress modern video cards.
Because Hitman supports both DX11 and DX12, for the moment we’ve gone ahead and benchmarked it with both. In practice the performance impact of DX12 is very mixed; NVIDIA cards prior to Pascal lose performance and Pascal cards can either gain or lose performance. AMD cards on the other hand tend to gain performance. The image quality is the same with both renderers, so it’s simply a matter of picking the render path that produces the best performance for a given card.
In any case, the GTX 1080 continues to top the charts here. 60fps still isn’t attainable at 4K, but it can deliver a reasonably playable 49fps. Alternatively, at 1440p it does better than 85fps. Meanwhile the GTX 1070 isn’t a great option at 4K, but at 1440p it can easily stay north of 60fps, delivering 69.4fps.
Thanks in part to the DX12 code path, this is another game where the GTX 1070 performs as expected versus GTX 1080, but still can’t hold on to second place. Rather the Radeon Fury X takes second place at all but 1080p.
Looking at our generational comparisons one last time, this final game has the Pascal cards performing better than expected. At 1440p and above, the GTX 1080 hits 86% better performance than the GTX 980 under DirectX 11, and the GTX 1070 bests the GTX 970 by an average of 63% in the same circumstances. As best as I can tell, there is just something about the Pascal cards that is slightly more in tune with this game than was the Maxwell 2 cards, leading to the performance we’re seeing here. Otherwise the gap between the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 is pretty typical at about 25% at the higher resolutions.
Finally, in our last time checking in on the GTX 680, the GTX 1080 offers a commanding performance improvement. GTX 1080 is 4.1x faster than GTX 680 under DirectX 11, reinforcing just how much progress NVIDIA had made in 4 years and a single full manufacturing node upgrade.
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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/