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 ESTGPU 2016 Benchmark Suite & The Test
As this is the first high-end card release for 2016, we have gone ahead and updated our video card benchmarking suite. Unfortunately Broadwell-E launched just a bit too late for this review, so we’ll have to hold off on updating the underlying platform to Intel’s latest and greatest for a little while longer yet.
For the 2016 suite we have retained Grand Theft Auto V, Battlefield 4, and of course, Crysis 3. Joining these games are 6 new games: Rise of the Tomb Raider, DiRT Rally, Ashes of the Singularity, The Witcher 3, The Division, and the 2016 rendition of Hitman.
| AnandTech GPU Bench 2016 Game List | ||||
| Game | Genre | API(s) | ||
| Rise of the Tomb Raider | Action | DX11 | ||
| DiRT Rally | Racing | DX11 | ||
| Ashes of the Singularity | RTS | DX12 | ||
| Battlefield 4 | FPS | DX11 | ||
| Crysis 3 | FPS | DX11 | ||
| The Witcher 3 | RPG | DX11 | ||
| The Division | FPS | DX11 | ||
| Grand Theft Auto V | Action/Open World | DX11 | ||
| Hitman (2016) | Action/Stealth | DX11 + DX12 | ||
As was the case in 2015, the API used will be based on the best API available for a given card. Rise of the Tomb Raider and Hitman both support DirectX 11 + DirectX 12; in the case of Tomb Raider the DX12 path was until last week a regression – a new patch changed things too late for this article – and meanwhile the best API for Hitman depends on whether we’re looking at an AMD or NVIDIA card. For now Tomb Raider is benchmarked using DX11 and Hitman on both DX11 and DX12. Meanwhile Ashes of the Singularity is essentially tailor made for DirectX 12, as the first DX12 game to be designed for it as opposed to porting over a DX11 engine, so it is being run under DX12 at all times.
Meanwhile from a design standpoint our benchmark settings remain unchanged. For lower-end cards we’ll look at 1080p at various quality settings when practical, and for high-end cards we’ll be looking at 1080p and above at the highest quality settings.
The Test
As for our hardware testbed, it remains unchanged from 2015, being composed of an overclocked Core i7-4960X housed in an NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition case.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 AMD Radeon RX 480 AMD Radeon Fury X AMD Radeon R9 Nano AMD Radeon R9 390X AMD Radeon R9 390 AMD Radeon HD 7970 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 368.39 AMD Radeon Software Crimson 16.7.1 (RX 480) AMD Radeon Software Crimson 16.6.2 (All Others) |
| OS: | Windows 10 Pro |
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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.