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 ESTGrand Theft Auto V
The latest edition of Rockstar’s venerable series of open world action games, Grand Theft Auto V was originally released to the last-gen consoles back in 2013. However thanks to a rather significant facelift for the current-gen consoles and PCs, along with the ability to greatly turn up rendering distances and add other features like MSAA and more realistic shadows, the end result is a game that is still among the most stressful of our benchmarks when all of its features are turned up. Furthermore, in a move rather uncharacteristic of most open world action games, Grand Theft Auto also includes a very comprehensive benchmark mode, giving us a great chance to look into the performance of an open world action game.
On a quick note about settings, as Grand Theft Auto V doesn't have pre-defined settings tiers, I want to quickly note what settings we're using. For "Very High" quality we have all of the primary graphics settings turned up to their highest setting, with the exception of grass, which is at its own very high setting. Meanwhile 4x MSAA is enabled for direct views and reflections. This setting also involves turning on some of the advanced redering features - the game's long shadows, high resolution shadows, and high definition flight streaming - but it not increasing the view distance any further.
Otherwise for "High" quality we take the same basic settings but turn off all MSAA, which significantly reduces the GPU rendering and VRAM requirements.
GTA V is another game that in recent times has favored NVIDIA GPUs, and as a result the GTX 1080 enjoys a solid standing here. At 61.4fps, the card becomes the first card to crack 60fps at 4K, albeit at only High quality. For very high quality, it becomes the first card to crack 30fps, both reinforcing how much of an improvement the card is over the previous generation and at the same time highlighting that it’s still going to have to make quality tradeoffs for 60fps at 4K.
Second to only the GTX 1080 is of course the GTX 1070. 4K is arguably out of the question, but at 1440p it can do just better than 60fps, making it the second card to do so. And though largely symbolic, it manages to do so when the GTX 980 Ti could not.
Looking at the generational improvements, GTA shows slightly better than average scaling with the new Pascal cards. GTX 1080 holds a anywhere between a 61% and 71% lead over the GTX 980, with particularly good gains above 1080p. Meanwhile GTX 1070 averages just shy of 60% over its GTX 970 counterpart.
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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.