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 ESTNVIDIA Works: ANSEL & VRWorks Audio
Along with the various hardware aspects of Pascal, NVIDIA’s software teams have also been working on new projects to coincide with the Pascal launch. These are a new screenshot tool, and a new audio simulation package based on path traced audio.
We’ll start with NVIDIA’s new screenshot utility. Dubbed ANSEL, after famous American environmental photographer Ansel Adams, ANSEL is a very different take on screenshots. Rather than taking screenshots from the player’s perspective at the game rendering resolution, ANSEL allows for an entire scene to be captured at a far higher resolution than with standard screenshots. NVIDIA is pitching this as an art tool rather than a gaming tool, and I get the impression that this is one of those pie-in-the-sky kind of ideas that NVIDIA’s software group decided to run with in order to best show off Pascal’s various capabilities.
At its core, ANSEL is a means to decouple taking screenshot from the limitations of the player’s view. In an ANSEL-enabled application, ANSEL can freeze the state of the game, move the camera around, and then generate a copious amount of viewports to take screenshots. The end result is that ANSEL makes it possible to generate an ultra-high resolution 360 degree stereo 3D image of a game scene. The analogy NVIDIA is working towards is dropping a high quality 360 degree camera into a game, and letting users play with it as they see fit.
But even this isn’t really a great description of ANSEL, as there isn’t anything else like it to compare it to. Some games have offered 360 degree capture, but they haven’t done so at any kind of resolution approaching what ANSEL can do. And this still doesn’t touch features such as HDR (FP16) scene capture or the free camera.
Under the hood, ANSEL is at times a checklist for Pascal technologies (though it does work with Maxwell 2 as well). In order to capture scenes at a super high resolution, it forces a scene to its maximum LOD and breaks it down into a number of viewports, implemented efficiently using SMP. To demonstrate this technology NVIDIA put together a 4.5Gpix image rendered out of The Witcher 3, which was composed of 3600 such viewport tiles. Meanwhile stitching together the individual tiles is a CUDA based rendering process, which uses overlapping tiles to resolve any tone mapping conflicts. Finally, ANSEL captures images before they’re actually sent to a display, grabbing HDR images (in EXR format0 in games that support HDR.
Meanwhile given its level of deep interaction with games, ANSEL does require individual game support to work. This is in the form of a library provided by NVIDIA, which helps ANSEL and NVIDIA’s driver make sense of a scene and pause the simulation when necessary. Unsurprisingly, NVIDIA is eager to get ANSEL into more games – it just launched on Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst – and as a result is touting to developers that ANSEL is easy to implement, having taken only 150 lines of code on The Witcher 3.
Ultimately NVIDIA seems to be throwing ANSEL at the wall here to see what sticks. But it should be neat to see what users end up doing with the technology,
VRWorks Audio
Not to be outdone by the ANSEL team, other parts of NVIDIA’s software group has been working on a slightly different kind of project for NVIDIA: audio. As a GPU company, NVIDIA has never been deeply involved with audio (not since getting out of the chipset business, at least), but with the current focus on VR, they are taking a crack at it in a new way.
VRWorks Audio is the latest library as part of NVIDIA’s larger VRWorks suite. As given away by the name, this library is focused on audio, specifically for VR. In a nutshell, VRWorks is a full audio simulation library, using path tracing to power the simulation. The goal of VRWorks Audio is to provide a realistic sound simulation for VR, to further increase the apparent realism.
Under the hood, VRWorks audio leverages NVIDIA’s existing OptiX path tracing technology. Only rather than tracing light it’s used to trace sound waves. Along with simulating audio propagation itself – including occlusion and reverb – VRWorks Audio is also able to run the necessary Head Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) to reduce the simulation down to binaural audio for headphones.
All of this is, of course, executed on Pascal’s CUs in a manner similar to path tracing or PhysX, running alongside the main graphics rendering thread. The amount of processing power required for VRWorks Audio can vary considerably depending on the detail desired (particularly the number of reflections); for NVIDIA’s VR Funhouse demo, VR Works audio can occupy most of a GPU on its own.
Ultimately, unlike some of the other technologies presented by NVIDIA, VRWorks Audio is in a relatively early stage. As a result while NVIDIA is shipping the SDK, there aren’t any games that are announced to be using it at this time, and if it gets any traction it’ll be farther into the future before we see the first games using it. That said, NVIDIA is already reaching out to the all-important middleware vendors on the subject, and to that end their own VR Funhouse demo is using FMOD with a VRWorks Audio plugin to handle the sound, demonstrating that they already have VRWorks Audio working with the popular audio middleware.
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grrrgrrr - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Solid review! Some nice architecture introductions.euskalzabe - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
The HDR discussion of this review was super interesting, but as always, there's one key piece of information missing: WHEN are we going to see HDR monitors that take advantage of these new GPU abilities?I myself am stuck at 1080p IPS because more resolution doesn't entice me, and there's nothing better than IPS. I'm waiting for HDR to buy my next monitor, but being 5 years old my Dell ST2220T is getting long in the teeth...
ajlueke - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Thanks for the review Ryan,I think the results are quite interesting, and the games chosen really help show the advantages and limitations of the different architectures. When you compare the GTX 1080 to its price predecessor, the 980 Ti, you are getting an almost universal ~25%-30% increase in performance.
Against rival AMDs R9 Fury X, there is more of a mixed bag. As the resolutions increase the bandwidth provided by the HBM memory on the Fury X really narrows the gap, sometimes trimming the margin to less that 10%,s specifically in games optimized more for DX12 "Hitman, "AotS". But it other games, specifically "Rise of the Tomb Raider" which boasts extremely high res textures, the 4Gb memory size on the Fury X starts to limit its performance in a big way. On average, there is again a ~25%-30% performance increase with much higher game to game variability.
This data lets a little bit of air out of the argument I hear a lot that AMD makes more "future proof" cards. While many Nvidia 900 series users may have to upgrade as more and more games switch to DX12 based programming. AMD Fury users will be in the same boat as those same games come with higher and higher res textures, due to the smaller amount of memory on board.
While Pascal still doesn't show the jump in DX12 versus DX11 that AMD's GPUs enjoy, it does at least show an increase or at least remain at parity.
So what you have is a card that wins in every single game tested, at every resolution over the price predecessors from both companies, all while consuming less power. That is a win pretty much any way you slice it. But there are elements of Nvidia’s strategy and the card I personally find disappointing.
I understand Nvidia wants to keep features specific to the higher margin professional cards, but avoiding HBM2 altogether in the consumer space seems to be a missed opportunity. I am a huge fan of the mini ITX gaming machines. And the Fury Nano, at the $450 price point is a great card. With an NVMe motherboard and NAS storage the need for drive bays in the case is eliminated, the Fury Nano at only 6” leads to some great forward thinking, and tiny designs. I was hoping to see an explosion of cases that cut out the need for supporting 10-11” cards and tons of drive bays if both Nvidia and AMD put out GPUs in the Nano space, but it seems not to be. HBM2 seems destined to remain on professional cards, as Nvidia won’t take the risk of adding it to a consumer Titan or GTX 1080 Ti card and potentially again cannibalize the higher margin professional card market. Now case makers don’t really have the same incentive to build smaller cases if the Fury Nano will still be the only card at that size. It’s just unfortunate that it had to happen because NVidia decided HBM2 was something they could slap on a pro card and sell for thousands extra.
But also what is also disappointing about Pascal stems from the GTX 1080 vs GTX 1070 data Ryan has shown. The GTX 1070 drops off far more than one would expect based off CUDA core numbers as the resolution increases. The GDDR5 memory versus the GDDR5X is probably at fault here, leading me to believe that Pascal can gain even further if the memory bandwidth is increased more, again with HBM2. So not only does the card limit you to the current mini-ITX monstrosities (I’m looking at you bulldog) by avoiding HBM2, it also very likely is costing us performance.
Now for the rank speculation. The data does present some interesting scenarios for the future. With the Fury X able to approach the GTX 1080 at high resolutions, most specifically in DX12 optimized games. It seems extremely likely that the Vega GPU will be able to surpass the GTX 1080, especially if the greatest limitation (4 Gb HBM) is removed with the supposed 8Gb of HBM2 and games move more and more the DX12. I imagine when it launches it will be the 4K card to get, as the Fury X already acquits itself very well there. For me personally, I will have to wait for the Vega Nano to realize my Mini-ITX dreams, unless of course, AMD doesn’t make another Nano edition card and the dream is dead. A possibility I dare not think about.
eddman - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
The gap getting narrower at higher resolutions probably has more to do with chips' designs rather than bandwidth. After all, Fury is the big GCN chip optimized for high resolutions. Even though GP104 does well, it's still the middle Pascal chip.P.S. Please separate the paragraphs. It's a pain, reading your comment.
Eidigean - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
The GTX 1070 is really just a way for Nvidia to sell GP104's that didn't pass all of their tests. Don't expect them to put expensive memory on a card where they're only looking to make their money back. Keeping the card cost down, hoping it sells, is more important to them.If there's a defect anywhere within one of the GPC's, the entire GPC is disabled and the chip is sold at a discount instead of being thrown out. I would not buy a 1070 which is really just a crippled 1080.
I'll be buying a 1080 for my 2560x1600 desktop, and an EVGA 1060 for my Mini-ITX build; which has a limited power supply.
mikael.skytter - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Thanks Ryan! Much appreciated.chrisp_6@yahoo.com - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Very good review. One minor comment to the article writers - do a final check on grammer - granted we are technical folks, but it was noticeable especially on the final words page.madwolfa - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
It's "grammar", though. :)Eden-K121D - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Oh the ironychrisp_6@yahoo.com - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
oh snap, that is some funny stuff right there