DiRT 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.

DiRT Rally - 3840x2160 - Ultra Quality

DiRT Rally - 2560x1440 - Ultra Quality

DiRT Rally - 1920x1080 - Ultra Quality

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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  • Eidigean - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    Excellent article Ryan.

    Will you be writing a followup article with tests of two GTX 1080's in SLI with the new high-bandwidth dual bridge?

    Looking specifically for these tests in SLI:
    3840x2160
    2560x1440
    3x 2560x1440 (7680x1440)
    3x 1920x1080 (5760x1080)

    Hoping the latter two tests would include with and without multi-projection optimizations.
    Thanks!
  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    "Will you be writing a followup article with tests of two GTX 1080's in SLI with the new high-bandwidth dual bridge?"

    It's on the schedule. But not in the near term, unfortunately. GPU Silly Season is in full swing right now.
  • big dom - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    I agree with the previous reviewers. It's fine and dandy to be a "day one" breakthrough reviewer and believe me I read and enjoyed 20 of those other day 1 reviews as well. But... IMO no one writes such an in depth, technical, and layman-enjoyable review like Anandtech. Excellent review fellas!

    This is coming from a GTX 1070 FE owner, and I am also the other of the original Battleship Mtron SSD article.

    Regards,
    Dominick
  • big dom - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    *author
  • jase240 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    I don't understand why in your benchmarks the framerates are so low. For example I have a 1070 and am able to play GTAV at very high settings and achieve 60fps constant at 4K.(No MSAA obviously)

    Even other reviewers have noted much higher framerates. Listing the 1080 as a true 4K card and the 1070 as a capable 4K card too.
  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    It depends on the settings.

    The way I craft these tests is settings centric. I pick the settings and see where the cards fall. Some other sites have said that they see what settings a card performs well at (e.g. where it gets 60fps) and then calibrate around that.

    The end result is that the quality settings I test are most likely higher than the sites you're comparing this article to.
  • jase240 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    Ah now I see why, you have the advanced graphics settings turned up also. These are not turned on by default in GTAV since they cause great performance loss.

    Extended Distance Scaling, Extended Shadows Distance, Long Shadows, High Resolution Shadows, High Detail Streaming While Flying.

    They eat a lot of VRAM and perform terribly at higher resolutions.
  • sonicmerlin - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link

    And I'm guessing add very little to overall picture quality.
  • Mat3 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    I think there's something wrong with your Fury X in a couple of your compute tests. How's it losing to a Nano?
  • masouth - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    I know the article was posted today but when was it actually written? NewEgg has been having the dual fan Gigabyte GTX 1070 at $399 for a couple weeks now. Yes, it's still $20 over the MSRP and frequently sells out as quick as they show up but it's still a fair deal cheaper than $429.

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