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 ESTBattlefield 4
One of the older games in our benchmark suite, DICE’s Battlefield 4 remains a staple of MP gaming. Even at its age, Battlefield 4 remained a challenging game in its own right, as very few mass market MP shooters push the envelope on graphics quality right now. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, based on our experiences our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, which means a card needs to be able to average at least 60fps if it’s to be able to hold up in multiplayer.
As a game that has traditionally favored NVIDIA, Battlefield 4 makes for a very clean sweep of the field. The GTX 1080 takes top honors with the GTX 1070 some distance behind it. Notably, the two Pascal cards become the first cards to cross 60fps at 4K, which means that they’re the first cards we can be reasonably sure won’t have framerate dips below 30fps in multiplayer.
Looking at our standard generational comparisons, both GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 improve upon their predecessors by about what we’d expect; 67% and 58% respectively. Or to see how GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 compare, we find that the GTX 1080 leads its cut-down sibling by between 20% and 25%, with the gap increasing with the resolution. This is consistent with what we know about GTX 1080, as its bandwidth advantage means that it’s going to have an easier time pushing pixels at 4K, as the case is here.
Finally, to check in on the GTX 680, we find the GTX 1080 has only improved in performance by 2.8x, which is actually a bit less of a gain than the average. None the less we’ve gone from a card that can’t quite muster 1080p with 4xMSAA to a card that can easily handle 4K without any MSAA.
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Ryan Smith - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
2) I suspect the v-sync comparison is a 3 deep buffer at a very high framerate.lagittaja - Sunday, July 24, 2016 - link
1) It is a big part of it. Remember how bad 20nm was?The leakage was really high so Nvidia/AMD decided to skip it. FinFET's helped reduce the leakage for the "14/16"nm node.
That's apples to oranges. CPU's are already 3-4Ghz out of the box.
RX480 isn't showing it because the 14nm LPP node is a lemon for GPU's.
You know what's the optimal frequency for Polaris 10? 1Ghz. After that the required voltage shoots up.
You know, LPP where the LP stands for Low Power. Great for SoC's but GPU's? Not so much.
"But the SoC's clock higher than 2Ghz blabla". Yeah, well a) that's the CPU and b) it's freaking tiny.
How are we getting 2Ghz+ frequencies with Pascal which so closely resembles Maxwell?
Because of the smaller manufacturing node. How's that possible? It's because of FinFET's which reduced the leakage of the 20nm node.
Why couldn't we have higher clockspeeds without FinFET's at 28nm? Because power.
28nm GPU's capped around the 1.2-1.4Ghz mark.
20nm was no go, too high leakage current.
16nm gives you FinFET's which reduced the leakage current dramatically.
What does that enable you to do? Increase the clockspeed..
Here's a good article
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8223/an-introduction...
lagittaja - Sunday, July 24, 2016 - link
As an addition to the RX 480 / Polaris 10 clockspeedGCN2-GCN4 VDD vs Fmax at avg ASIC
http://i.imgur.com/Hdgkv0F.png
timchen - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Another question is about boost 3.0: given that we see 150-200 Mhz gpu offset very common across boards, wouldn't it be beneficial to undervolt (i.e. disallow the highest voltage bins corresponding to this extra 150-200 Mhz) and offset at the same time to maintain performance at lower power consumption? Why did Nvidia not do this in the first place? (This is coming from reading Tom's saying that 1060 can be a 60w card having 80% of its performance...)AnnonymousCoward - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
NVIDIA, get with the program and support VESA Adaptive-Sync already!!! When your $700 card can't support the VESA standard that's in my monitor, and as a result I have to live with more lag and lower framerate, something is seriously wrong. And why wouldn't you want to make your product more flexible?? I'm looking squarely at you, Tom Petersen. Don't get hung up on your G-sync patent and support VESA!AnnonymousCoward - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
If the stock cards reach the 83C throttle point, I don't see what benefit an OC gives (won't you just reach that sooner?). It seems like raising the TDP or under-voltaging would boost continuous performance. Your thoughts?modeless - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
Thanks for the in depth FP16 section! I've been looking forward to the full review. I have to say this is puzzling. Why put it on there at all? Emulation would be faster. But anyway, NVIDIA announced a new Titan X just now! Does this one have FP16 for $1200? Instant buy for me if so.Ryan Smith - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
Emulation would be faster, but it would not be the same as running it on a real FP16x2 unit. It's the same purpose as FP64 units: for binary compatibility so that developers can write and debug Tesla applications on their GeForce GPU.hoohoo - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
Excellent article, Ryan, thank you!Especially the info on preemption and async/scheduling.
I expected the preemption mght be expensive in some circumstances, but I didn't quite expect it to push the L2 cache though! Still this is a marked improvement for nVidia.
hoohoo - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
It seems like the preemption is implemented in the driver though? Are there actual h/w instructions to as it were "swap stack pointer", "push LDT", "swap instruction pointer"?