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 ESTHitman
The final game in our 2016 benchmark suite is the 2016 edition of Hitman, the latest title in the stealth-action franchise. The game offers two rendering paths: DirectX 11 and DirectX 12, with the latter being the case of DirectX 12 being added after the fact. As with past Hitman games, the latest proves to have a good mix of scenery and high model counts to stress modern video cards.
Because Hitman supports both DX11 and DX12, for the moment we’ve gone ahead and benchmarked it with both. In practice the performance impact of DX12 is very mixed; NVIDIA cards prior to Pascal lose performance and Pascal cards can either gain or lose performance. AMD cards on the other hand tend to gain performance. The image quality is the same with both renderers, so it’s simply a matter of picking the render path that produces the best performance for a given card.
In any case, the GTX 1080 continues to top the charts here. 60fps still isn’t attainable at 4K, but it can deliver a reasonably playable 49fps. Alternatively, at 1440p it does better than 85fps. Meanwhile the GTX 1070 isn’t a great option at 4K, but at 1440p it can easily stay north of 60fps, delivering 69.4fps.
Thanks in part to the DX12 code path, this is another game where the GTX 1070 performs as expected versus GTX 1080, but still can’t hold on to second place. Rather the Radeon Fury X takes second place at all but 1080p.
Looking at our generational comparisons one last time, this final game has the Pascal cards performing better than expected. At 1440p and above, the GTX 1080 hits 86% better performance than the GTX 980 under DirectX 11, and the GTX 1070 bests the GTX 970 by an average of 63% in the same circumstances. As best as I can tell, there is just something about the Pascal cards that is slightly more in tune with this game than was the Maxwell 2 cards, leading to the performance we’re seeing here. Otherwise the gap between the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 is pretty typical at about 25% at the higher resolutions.
Finally, in our last time checking in on the GTX 680, the GTX 1080 offers a commanding performance improvement. GTX 1080 is 4.1x faster than GTX 680 under DirectX 11, reinforcing just how much progress NVIDIA had made in 4 years and a single full manufacturing node upgrade.
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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?