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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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.