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 ESTRise of the Tomb Raider
Starting things off in our benchmark suite is the built-in benchmark for Rise of the Tomb Raider, the latest iteration in the long-running action-adventure gaming series. One of the unique aspects of this benchmark is that it’s actually the average of 4 sub-benchmarks that fly through different environments, which keeps the benchmark from being too weighted towards a GPU’s performance characteristics under any one scene.
To kick things off then, while I picked the benchmark order before collecting the performance results, it’s neat that Rise of the Tomb Raider ends up being a fairly consistent representation of how the various video cards compare to each other. The end result, as you might expect, puts the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 solidly in the lead. And truthfully there’s no reason for it to be anything but this; NVIDIA does not face any competition from AMD at the high-end at this point, so the two GP104 cards are going to be unrivaled. It’s not a question of who wins, but by how much.
Overall we find the GTX 1080 ahead of its predecessor, the GTX 980, by anywhere between 60% and 78%, with the lead increasing with the resolution. The GTX 1070’s lead isn’t quite as significant though, ranging from 53% to 60#. This is consistent with the fact that the GTX 1070 is specified to trail the GTX 1080 by more than we saw with the 980/970 in 2014, which means that in general the GTX 1070 won’t see quite as much uplift.
What we do get however is confirmation that the GTX 1070FE is a GTX 980 Ti and more. The performance of what was NVIDIA’s $650 flagship can now be had in a card that costs $450, and with any luck will get cheaper still as supplies improve. For 1440p gamers this should hit a good spot in terms of performance.
Otherwise when it comes to 4K gaming, NVIDIA has made a lot of progress thanks to GTX 1080, but even their latest and greatest card isn’t quite going to crack 60fps here. We haven’t yet escaped having to made quality tradeoffs for 4K at this time, and it’s likely that future games will drive that point home even more.
Finally, 1080p is admittedly here largely for the sake of including much older cards like the GTX 680, to show what kind of progress NVIDIA has made since their first 28nm high-end card. The result? A 4.25x performance increase over the GTX 680.
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jcardel - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
This is excactly the same situation as me. I got a 770 sitting in my rig, and am looking hard at the 1070, maybe soon. Although my 770 is still up to the task in most games, I really play only blizzard games theese days and they are not hard on your hardware.My biggest issue is really that it is rather noisy, so I will be looking for a solution with the lowest DB.
Great article, it was totally worth waiting for.. I only read this sort of stuff here so have been waiting till now for any 1080 review.
Thanks!
D. Lister - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Nice job, Ryan. Good comeback. Keep it up.Saeid92 - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
What is 99th procentile framerate?Ryan Smith - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
If you sorted the framerate from highest to lowest, this would be the framerate of the slowest 1%. It's basically a more accurate/meaningful metric for minimum frame rates.Eris_Floralia - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
This is why I love Anandtech. Deep in reviews. Well I even wanted to be one of your editors if you have the plan to create a Chinese transtate version of these reviews.daku123 - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Typo on FP16 Throughput page. In second paragraph, it should be Tegra X1 (not Tesla X1?).Ryan Smith - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Eyup. Thanks!Badelhas - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Great detailed review, as always. But I have to ask once again:why didnt you do some kind of VR Benchmarks? Thats what drives my choises now, to be honest.
Cheers
Ranger1065 - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
After over 2 months of reading GTX1080 reviews I felt a distinct lack of excitementas I read Anandtech kicking off their review of the finfet generation. Could it
prove to be anything but an anticlimax?
Sadly and unsurprisingly...NOT.
It was however amusing to see the faithfull positively gushing praises for Anandtech
now that the "greatly anticipated" review is finally out.
Yes folks, 20 or so pages of (well written) information, mostly already covered by other tech sites,
finally published, it's as if a magic wand has been waved, the information has been presented with
that special Anandtech sauce, new insights have been illuminated and all is well in Anandtechland again.
(AT LEAST UNTIL THE NEXT 2 MONTH DELAY.) LOL.
I do like the way Anandtech presents the FPS charts.
Back to sleep now Anandtech :)
mkaibear - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
You've hit the nail on the head here Ranger.The info which is included within the article is indeed mostly already covered by other tech sites.
Emphasis on the "mostly" and the plural "sites".
Those of us who have jobs which keep us busy and have an interest in this sort of thing often don't have the time to trawl round many different sites to get reviews and pertinent technical data so we rely upon those sites which we trust to produce in-depth articles, even if they take a bit longer.
As an IT Manager for (most recently) a manufacturing firm and then a school, I don't care about bleeding edge, get the new stuff as soon as it comes out, I care about getting the right stuff, and a two month delay to get a proper review is absolutely fine. If I need quick benchmarks I'll use someone like Hexus or HardOCP but to get a deep dive into the architecture so I can justify purchases to the Art and Media departments, or the programers is essential. You don't get that anywhere else.