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 ESTThe Division
The final first person shooter in our benchmark suite, The Division is a multiplayer-only game powered by Ubisoft’s Snowdrop engine. The game’s design focuses on detailed urban environments and utilizes dynamic global illumination for parts of its lighting. For our testing we use the game’s built-in benchmark, which cycles through a number of scenes/areas of the game.
As a bit of an unknown when it comes to engines, we went ahead and benchmarked this game at 4K with both Ultra and High settings, to see how performance was impacted by reducing the image quality. The result is that even at High quality, the GTX 1080 isn’t going to be able to hit 60fps. When it comes to The Division and 4K, your options are to either put up with a framerate in the mid-40s or make greater image quality sacrifices. That said, the GTX 1080 does get the distinction of being the only card to even crack 40fps at 4K; the GTX 1070 isn’t doing much better than 30fps.
More than anything else, this game is unexpectedly sensitive to the differences between the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. Normally the GTX 1080 would lead by 25% or so, but in The Division that’s a 33% to 40% lead. It’s more than you’d expect given the differences between the two cards’ configurations, and while I suspect it’s a combination of memory bandwidth differences and ALU throughput differences, I’m also not 100% convinced it’s not a bug of some kind. So we’ll have to see if this changes at all.
In any case, the more significant gap between the Pascal cards means that while GTX 1080 is comfortably leading, this is one of the only cases where GTX 1070 isn’t at least at parity with GTX 980 Ti. The gap closes with the resolution, but at all points GTX 1070 comes up short. It’s not a total wash for the GTX 1070 since it’s both significantly cheaper and significantly more energy efficient than GTX 980 Ti, but it’s very rare for the card not to be hanging relatively close to GTX 1080.
Looking at the generational differences, GTX 1080 enjoys a solid lead over GTX 980. With the exception of 1440p, it improves on its direct predecessor by 60% or more. Meanwhile GTX 1070, despite its greater handicap, is a consistent 50%+ faster than GTX 970.
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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?