The Witcher 3

The third game in CD Projekt RED’s expansive RPG series, The Witcher 3 is our RPG benchmark of choice. Utilizing the company’s in-house engine, REDengine 3, The Witcher makes use of an array of DirectX 11 features, all of which combine to make the game both stunning and surprisingly GPU-intensive. Our benchmark is based on an action-heavy in-engine cutscene early in the game, and Hairworks is disabled.

The Witcher 3 - 3840x2160 - Ultra Quality (No Hairworks)

The Witcher 3 - 2560x1440 - Ultra Quality (No Hairworks)

The Witcher 3 - 1920x1080 - Ultra Quality (No Hairworks)

The GTX 1080 never doesn’t lead in our benchmarks, but The Witcher 3 is another strong showing for the card. At 44fps for 4K, it’s three-quarters of the way to 60fps, with gives us a reasonably playable framerate even at these high quality settings. However to get 60fps you’ll still have to back off on the quality settings or resolution. Meanwhile the GTX 1070, although capable of better than 30fps at 4K, is more at home at 1440p, where the card just cracks 60fps.

Looking at the generational comparisons, the Pascal cards are about average under The Witcher 3. GTX 1080 leads GTX 980 by an average of 66%, and GTX 1070 leads GTX 970 by 58%. Similarly, the gap between the two Pascal cards is pretty typical at 24% in favor of the GTX 1080.

Finally, checking in on poor Kepler, we find GTX 680 at 31.3fps at 1080p, as compared to GTX 1080’s 100.3fps. This gives NVIDIA’s latest flagship a 3.2x advantage over its 4 year old predecessor.

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  • Robalov - Tuesday, July 26, 2016 - link

    Feels like it took 2 years longer than normal for this review :D
  • extide - 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."

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