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 ESTAshes of the Singularity
Sorely missing from our benchmark suite for quite some time have been RTSes, which don’t enjoy quite the popularity they once did. As a result Ashes holds a special place in our hearts, and that’s before we talk about the technical aspects. Based on developer Oxide Games’ Nitrous Engine, Ashes has been designed from the ground up for low-level APIs like DirectX 12. As a result of all of the games in our benchmark suite, this is the game making the best use of DirectX 12’s various features, from asynchronous compute to multi-threadeded work submission and high batch counts. What we see can’t be extrapolated to all DirectX 12 games, but it gives us a very interesting look at what we might expect in the future.
Once again the top spot is uncontested by the GTX 1080. However after that, things become more interesting. On the whole, Ashes is a game that favors AMD GPU over NVIDIA GPUs, and as a result the GTX 1070 does not get to lock in second place. Rather that goes to the last generation Fury X. AMD designs are very ALU-heavy, and I suspect Ashes is capable of putting those ALUs to good use, something most other games struggle with. That said, if we normalized this for price or power consumption, then the Pascal cards would be well in the lead, but it does show that on an absolute basis, GTX 1070 isn’t going to outrun the best of the last-gen cards all the time.
Meanwhile it’s interesting to note that one of the more unusual aspects of the engine behind Ashes is that it’s relatively resolution insensitive. That is, performance only drops moderately as we increase the resolution. This means that we need a GTX 1070 to sustain better than 60fps at 1080p, but that same card is still getting better than 40fps at 4K, a resolution with 4x the pixels.
Finally, looking at our NVIDIA cards on a generational basis, even without their commanding lead, the two Pascal cards show the expected generational gains. GTX 1080 improves on GTX 980 by between 65% and 70%, and GTX 1070 improves on GTX 970 by between 53% and 58%.
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Ranger1065 - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Your unwavering support for Anandtech is impressive.I too have a job that keeps me busy, yet oddly enough I find the time to browse (I prefer that word to "trawl") a number of sites.
I find it helps to form objective opinions.
I don't believe in early adoption, but I do believe in getting the job done on time, however if you are comfortable with a 2 month delay, so be it :)
Interesting to note that architectural deep dives concern your art and media departments so closely in their purchasing decisions. Who would have guessed?
It's true (God knows it's been stated here often enough) that
Anandtech goes into detail like no other, I don't dispute that.
But is it worth the wait? A significant number seem to think not.
Allow me to leave one last issue for you to ponder (assuming you have the time in your extremely busy schedule).
Is it good for Anandtech?
catavalon21 - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Impatient as I was at the first for benchmarks, yes, I'm a numbers junkie, since it's evident precious few of us will have had a chance to buy one of these cards yet (or the 480), I doubt the delay has caused anyone to buy the wrong card. Can't speak for the smart phone review folks are complaining about being absent, but as it turns out, what I'm initially looking for is usually done early on in Bench. The rest of this, yeah, it can wait.mkaibear - Saturday, July 23, 2016 - link
Job, house, kids, church... more than enough to keep me sufficiently busy that I don't have the time to browse more than a few sites. I pick them quite carefully.Given the lifespan of a typical system is >5 years I think that a 2 month delay is perfectly reasonable. It can often take that long to get purchasing signoff once I've decided what they need to purchase anyway (one of the many reasons that architectural deep dives are useful - so I can explain why the purchase is worthwhile). Do you actually spend someone else's money at any point or are you just having to justify it to yourself?
Whether or not it's worth the wait to you is one thing - but it's clearly worth the wait to both Anandtech and to Purch.
razvan.uruc@gmail.com - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Excellent article, well deserved the wait!giggs - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
While this is a very thorough and well written review, it makes me wonder about sponsored content and product placement.The PG279Q is the only monitor mentionned, making sure the brand appears, and nothing about competing products. It felt unnecessary.
I hope it's just a coincidence, but considering there has been quite a lot of coverage about Asus in the last few months, I'm starting to doubt some of the stuff I read here.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
"The PG279Q is the only monitor mentionned, making sure the brand appears, and nothing about competing products."There's no product placement or the like (and if there was, it would be disclosed). I just wanted to name a popular 1440p G-Sync monitor to give some real-world connection to the results. We've had cards for a bit that can drive 1440p monitors at around 60fps, but GTX 1080 is really the first card that is going to make good use of higher refresh rate monitors.
giggs - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Fair enough, thank you for responding promptly. Keep up the good work!arh2o - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
This is really the gold standard of reviews. More in-depth than any site on the internet. Great job Ryan, keep up the good work.Ranger1065 - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
This is a quality article.timchen - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Great article. It is pleasant to read more about technology instead of testing results. Some questions though:1. higher frequency: I am kind of skeptical that the overall higher frequency is mostly enabled by FinFET. Maybe it is the case, but for example when Intel moved to FinFET we did not see such improvement. RX480 is not showing that either. It seems pretty evident the situation is different from 8800GTX where we first get frequency doubling/tripling only in the shader domain though. (Wow DX10 is 10 years ago... and computation throughput is improved by 20x)
2. The fastsync comparison graph looks pretty suspicious. How can Vsync have such high latency? The most latency I can see in a double buffer scenario with vsync is that the screen refresh just happens a tiny bit earlier than the completion of a buffer. That will give a delay of two frame time which is like 33 ms (Remember we are talking about a case where GPU fps>60). This is unless, of course, if they are testing vsync at 20hz or something.