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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Scali - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
There is hardware to quickly swap task contexts to/from VRAM.The driver can signal when a task needs to be pre-empted, which it can now do at any pixel/instruction.
If I understand Dynamic Load Balancing correctly, you can queue up tasks from the compute partition on the graphics partition, which will start running automatically once the graphics task has completed. It sounds like this is actually done without any interference from the driver.
tamalero - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
I swear the whole 1080 vs 480X remind me of the old fight between the 8800 and the 2900XTwhich somewhat improved int he 3870 and end with a winner whit the 4870.
I really hope AMD stops messing with the ATI division and lets them drop a winner.
AMD has been sinking ATI and making ATI carry the goddarn load of AMD's processor division failure.
doggface - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
Excellent article Ryan. I have been reading for several days whenever i can catch five minutes, and it has been quite the read! I look forward to the polaris review.I feel like u should bench these cards day 1, so that the whingers get it out od their system. Then label these reviews the "gp104" review, etc. It really was about the chip and board more than the specific cards....
PolarisOrbit - Saturday, July 23, 2016 - link
After reading the page about Simultaneous Multi Projection, I had a question of whether this feature could be used for more efficiently rendering reflections, like on a mirror or the surface of water. Does anyone know?KoolAidMan1 - Saturday, July 23, 2016 - link
Great review guys, in-depth and unbiased as always.On that note, the anger from a few AMD fanboys is hilarious, almost as funny as how pissed off the Google fanboys get whenever Anandtech dares say anything positive about an Apple product.
Love my EVGA GTX 1080 SC, blistering performance, couldn't be happier with it
prisonerX - Sunday, July 24, 2016 - link
Be careful, you might smug yourself to death.KoolAidMan1 - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link
Spotted the fanboy apologistbill44 - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link
Anyone here knows at least the supported audio sampling rates? If not, I think my best bet is going with AMD (which I'm sure supports 88.2 & 176.4 KHz).Anato - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link
Thanks for the review! Waited it long, read other's and then come this, this was the best!Squuiid - Tuesday, July 26, 2016 - link
Here's my Time Spy result in 3DMark for anyone interested in what an X5690 Mac Pro can do with a 1080 running in PCIe 1.1 in Windows 10.http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/13607976?