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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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"?