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 ESTHitman
The final game in our 2016 benchmark suite is the 2016 edition of Hitman, the latest title in the stealth-action franchise. The game offers two rendering paths: DirectX 11 and DirectX 12, with the latter being the case of DirectX 12 being added after the fact. As with past Hitman games, the latest proves to have a good mix of scenery and high model counts to stress modern video cards.
Because Hitman supports both DX11 and DX12, for the moment we’ve gone ahead and benchmarked it with both. In practice the performance impact of DX12 is very mixed; NVIDIA cards prior to Pascal lose performance and Pascal cards can either gain or lose performance. AMD cards on the other hand tend to gain performance. The image quality is the same with both renderers, so it’s simply a matter of picking the render path that produces the best performance for a given card.
In any case, the GTX 1080 continues to top the charts here. 60fps still isn’t attainable at 4K, but it can deliver a reasonably playable 49fps. Alternatively, at 1440p it does better than 85fps. Meanwhile the GTX 1070 isn’t a great option at 4K, but at 1440p it can easily stay north of 60fps, delivering 69.4fps.
Thanks in part to the DX12 code path, this is another game where the GTX 1070 performs as expected versus GTX 1080, but still can’t hold on to second place. Rather the Radeon Fury X takes second place at all but 1080p.
Looking at our generational comparisons one last time, this final game has the Pascal cards performing better than expected. At 1440p and above, the GTX 1080 hits 86% better performance than the GTX 980 under DirectX 11, and the GTX 1070 bests the GTX 970 by an average of 63% in the same circumstances. As best as I can tell, there is just something about the Pascal cards that is slightly more in tune with this game than was the Maxwell 2 cards, leading to the performance we’re seeing here. Otherwise the gap between the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 is pretty typical at about 25% at the higher resolutions.
Finally, in our last time checking in on the GTX 680, the GTX 1080 offers a commanding performance improvement. GTX 1080 is 4.1x faster than GTX 680 under DirectX 11, reinforcing just how much progress NVIDIA had made in 4 years and a single full manufacturing node upgrade.
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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.