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 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.
Once again the top spot is uncontested by the GTX 1080. However after that, things become more interesting. On the whole, Ashes is a game that favors AMD GPU over NVIDIA GPUs, and as a result the GTX 1070 does not get to lock in second place. Rather that goes to the last generation Fury X. AMD designs are very ALU-heavy, and I suspect Ashes is capable of putting those ALUs to good use, something most other games struggle with. That said, if we normalized this for price or power consumption, then the Pascal cards would be well in the lead, but it does show that on an absolute basis, GTX 1070 isn’t going to outrun the best of the last-gen cards all the time.
Meanwhile it’s interesting to note that one of the more unusual aspects of the engine behind Ashes is that it’s relatively resolution insensitive. That is, performance only drops moderately as we increase the resolution. This means that we need a GTX 1070 to sustain better than 60fps at 1080p, but that same card is still getting better than 40fps at 4K, a resolution with 4x the pixels.
Finally, looking at our NVIDIA cards on a generational basis, even without their commanding lead, the two Pascal cards show the expected generational gains. GTX 1080 improves on GTX 980 by between 65% and 70%, and GTX 1070 improves on GTX 970 by between 53% and 58%.
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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
*authorjase240 - 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.