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 ESTThe Witcher 3
The third game in CD Projekt RED’s expansive RPG series, The Witcher 3 is our RPG benchmark of choice. Utilizing the company’s in-house engine, REDengine 3, The Witcher makes use of an array of DirectX 11 features, all of which combine to make the game both stunning and surprisingly GPU-intensive. Our benchmark is based on an action-heavy in-engine cutscene early in the game, and Hairworks is disabled.
The GTX 1080 never doesn’t lead in our benchmarks, but The Witcher 3 is another strong showing for the card. At 44fps for 4K, it’s three-quarters of the way to 60fps, with gives us a reasonably playable framerate even at these high quality settings. However to get 60fps you’ll still have to back off on the quality settings or resolution. Meanwhile the GTX 1070, although capable of better than 30fps at 4K, is more at home at 1440p, where the card just cracks 60fps.
Looking at the generational comparisons, the Pascal cards are about average under The Witcher 3. GTX 1080 leads GTX 980 by an average of 66%, and GTX 1070 leads GTX 970 by 58%. Similarly, the gap between the two Pascal cards is pretty typical at 24% in favor of the GTX 1080.
Finally, checking in on poor Kepler, we find GTX 680 at 31.3fps at 1080p, as compared to GTX 1080’s 100.3fps. This gives NVIDIA’s latest flagship a 3.2x advantage over its 4 year old predecessor.
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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.