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%.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
200 Comments
View All Comments
Robalov - Tuesday, July 26, 2016 - link
Feels like it took 2 years longer than normal for this review :Dextide - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
The venn diagram is wrong -- for GP104 it says 1:64 speed for FP16 -- it is actually 1:1 for FP16 (ie same speed as FP32) (NOTE: GP100 has 2:1 FP16 -- meaning FP16 is twice as fast as FP32)extide - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
EDIT: I might be incorrect about this actually as I have seen information claiming both .. weird.mxthunder - Friday, July 29, 2016 - link
its really driving me nuts that a 780 was used instead of a 780ti.yhselp - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Have I understood correctly that Pascal offers a 20% increase in memory bandwidth from delta color compression over Maxwell? As in a total average of 45% over Kepler just from color compression?flexy - Sunday, September 4, 2016 - link
Sorry, late comment. I just read about GPU Boost 3.0 and this is AWESOME. What they did, is expose what previously was only doable with bios modding - eg assigning the CLK bins different voltages. The problem with overclocking Kepler/Maxwell was NOT so much that you got stuck with the "lowest" overclock as the article says, but that simply adding a FIXED amount of clocks across the entire range of clocks, as you would do with Afterburner etc. where you simply add, say +120 to the core. What happened here is that you may be "stable" at the max overclock (CLK bin), but since you added more CLKs to EVERY clock bin, the assigned voltages (in the BIOS) for each bin might not be sufficient. Say you have CLK bin 63 which is set to 1304Mhz in a stock bios. Now you use Afterburner and add 150 Mhz, now all of a sudden this bin amounts to 1454Mhz BUT STILL at the same voltage as before, which is too low for 1454Mhz. You had to manually edit the table in the BIOS to shift clocks around, especially since not all Maxwell cards allowed adding voltage via software.Ether.86 - Tuesday, November 1, 2016 - link
Astonishing review. That's the way Anandtech should be not like the mobile section which sucks...Warsun - Tuesday, January 17, 2017 - link
Yeah looking at the bottom here.The GTX 1070 is on the same level as a single 480 4GB card.So that graph is wrong.http://www.hwcompare.com/30889/geforce-gtx-1070-vs...
Remember this is from GPU-Z based on hardware specs.No amount of configurations in the Drivers changes this.They either screwed up i am calling shenanigans.
marceloamaral - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
Nice Ryan Smith! But, my question is, is it truly possible to share the GPU with different workloads in the P100? I've read in the NVIDIA manual that "The GPU has a time sliced scheduler to schedule work from work queues belonging to different CUDA contexts. Work launched to the compute engine from work queues belonging to different CUDA contexts cannot execute concurrently."marceloamaral - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
Nice Ryan Smith! But, my question is, is it truly possible to share the GPU with different workloads in the P100? I've read in the NVIDIA manual that "The GPU has a time sliced scheduler to schedule work from work queues belonging to different CUDA contexts. Work launched to the compute engine from work queues belonging to different CUDA contexts cannot execute concurrently."