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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bill44 - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
That's the problem. I know nothing about the 900 series audio capabilities (which I suppose is the same as the 800 series ;) ) and no one publishes them in review. All reviews are incomplete.Anyone here knows at least the supported audio sampling rates? If not, I think my best bet is going with AMD (which I'm shure supports 88.2 & 176.4 KHz).
bill44 - Saturday, July 23, 2016 - link
Anyone?poohbear - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
thank you for the review, late as it is it's still an excellent review and love the details!junky77 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
In other reviews, even a Haswell-E is limited for GPUs like GTX 1070JamesAnthony - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
I really appreciate all the work that went into this in depth review.I especially am very glad that you included the GTX 680 in the benchmarks along with all the other cards after it.
It's often really hard to get an overview of performance over a couple years.
I'm looking at upgrading 2 systems from GTX680 to either GTX 1070 or GTX 1060 and Titan (original one) to GTX 1080, so this helps see what the performance would be like.
Hopefully you tested the 1060 the same way so I can just plug the numbers for it into the same graph.
Thanks again!
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Be sure to check Bench. The 1060 results are already there, so you can see those comparisons right now.fivefeet8 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
2nd page 3rd paragraph: "generational increate in performance". ;increase?2nd page 2nd section: "Pascal in an architecture that I’m not sure has any real parallel on a historical basis". ;is?
hansmuff - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Great review, i like that you went into all the hardware details. Worth the wait.Chaser - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
I'm a Nvidia guy all the way. For now. I am disappointed in the midrange RX480 and it's power consumption compared to the competition, especially after they had said that Polaris was goingto primarily be an efficiency improvement.Outside of my bias I truly hope AMD provides a very competitive flagship in the near future. Everyone wins. But with the 1060 now announced it just makes AMD's GPU prospects and profitability questionable.
MarkieGcolor - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
So basically after all the hype about finfet, we get a standard, if not disappointing jump this generation also with a price hike. I'm so relieved that I didn't wait for this generation and can just enjoy my current 970 sli/nano crossfire rigs. AMD easily has the opportunity to blow these cards out of the water with big gpus.