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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DonMiguel85 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Agreed. They'll likely be much more power-hungry, but I believe it's definitely doable. At the very least it'll probably be similar to Fury X Vs. GTX 980sonicmerlin - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
The 1070 is as fast as the 980 ti. The 1060 is as fast as a 980. The 1080 is much faster than a 980 ti. Every card jumped up two tiers in performance from the previous gen. That's "standard" to you?Kvaern1 - Sunday, July 24, 2016 - link
I don't think there's much evidence pointing in the direction of GCN 4 blowing Pascal out of the water.Sadly, AMD needs a win but I don't see it coming. Budgets matter.
watzupken - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Brilliant review. Thanks for the in depth review. This is late, but the analysis is its strength and value add worth waiting for.ptown16 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
This review was a L O N G time coming, but gotta admit, excellent as always. This was the ONLY Pascal review to acknowledge and significantly include Kepler cards in the benchmarks and some comments. It makes sense to bench GK104 and analyze generational improvements since Kepler debuted 28nm and Pascal has finally ushered in the first node shrink since then. I guessed Anandtech would be the only site to do so, and looks like that's exactly what happened. Looking forward to the upcoming Polaris review!DonMiguel85 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
I do still wonder if Kepler's poor performance nowadays is largely due to neglected driver optimizations or just plain old/inefficient architecture. If it's the latter, it's really pretty bad with modern game workloads.ptown16 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
It may be a little of the latter, but Kepler was pretty amazing at launch. I suspect driver neglect though, seeing as how Kepler performance got notably WORSE soon after Maxwell. It's also interesting to see how the comparable GCN cards of that time, which were often slower than the Kepler competition, are now significantly faster.DonMiguel85 - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Yeah, and a GTX 960 often beats a GTX 680 or 770 in many newer games. Sometimes it's even pretty close to a 780.hansmuff - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
This is the one issue that has me wavering for the next card. My AMD cards, the last one being a 5850, have always lasted longer than my NV cards; of course at the expense of slower game fixes/ready drivers.So far so good with a 1.5yrs old 970, but I'm keeping a close eye on it. I'm looking forward to what VEGA brings.
ptown16 - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Yeah I'd keep an eye on it. My 770 can still play new games, albeit at lowered quality settings. The one hope for the 970 and other Maxwell cards is that Pascal is so similar. The only times I see performance taking a big hit would be newer games using asynchronous workloads, since Maxwell is poorly prepared to handle that. Otherwise maybe Maxwell cards will last much longer than Kepler. That said, I'm having second thoughts on the 1070 and curious to see what AMD can offer in the $300-$400 price range.