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 ESTCrysis 3
Still one of our most punishing benchmarks 3 years later, Crysis 3 needs no introduction. Crytek’s DX11 masterpiece, Crysis 3’s Very High settings still punish even the best of video cards, never mind the rest. Along with its high performance requirements, Crysis 3 is a rather balanced game in terms of power consumption and vendor optimizations. As a result it can give us a good look at how our video cards stack up on average, and later on in this article how power consumption plays out.
This being the first cycle we’ve used the Very High settings, it’s humorous to see a $700 video card getting 35fps on a 3 year old game. Very High settings give Crysis 3 a level of visual quality many games still can’t match, but the tradeoff is that it obliterates most video cards. We’re probably still 3-4 years out from a video card that can run at 4K with 4x MSAA at 60fps, never mind accomplishing that without the MSAA.
The GTX 1080 does however at least get the distinction of being the one and only card to crack 30fps at 4K. Though 30fps is not suggested for Crysis, it can legitimately claim to be the only card that can even handle the game at 4K with a playable framerate at this time. Otherwise if we turn down the resolution, the GTX 1080 is now the only card to crack 60fps at 1440p. Very close to that mark though is the GTX 1070, which at 58.1fps is a small overclock away from 60fps.
Looking at the generational comparisons, GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 lead by a bit less than usual, at 62% and 51% respectively. The GTX 1080/1070 gap on the other hand is pretty typical, with the GTX 1080 leading by 27% at 4K, 23% at 1440p, and 21% at 1080p.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
200 Comments
View All Comments
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?