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%.
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Ryan Smith - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Thanks.Eden-K121D - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Finally the GTX 1080 reviewguidryp - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
This echoes what I have been saying about this generation. It is really all about clock speed increases. IPC is essentially the same.This is where AMD lost out. Possibly in part the issue was going with GloFo instead of TSMC like NVidia.
Maybe AMD will move Vega to TSMC...
nathanddrews - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Curious... how did AMD lose out? Have you seen Vega benchmarks?TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
its all about clock speed for Nvidia, but not for AMD. AMD focused more on ICP, according to them.tarqsharq - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
It feels a lot like the P4 vs Athlon XP days almost.stereopticon - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
My favorite era of being a nerd!!! Poppin' opterons into s939 and pumpin the OC the athlon FX levels for a fraction of the price all while stompin' on pentium. It was a good (although expensive) time to a be a nerd... Besides paying 100 dollars for 1gb of DDR500. 6800gs budget friendly cards, and ATi x1800/1900 super beasts.. how i miss the dayseddman - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Not really. Pascal has pretty much the same IPC as Maxwell and its performance increases accordingly with the clockspeed.Pentium 4, on the other hand, had a terrible IPC compared to Athlon and even Pentium 3 and even jacking its clockspeed to the sky didn't help it.
guidryp - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
No one really improved IPC of their units.AMD was instead forced increase the unit count and chip size for 480 is bigger than the 1060 chip, and is using a larger bus. Both increase the chip cost.
AMD loses because they are selling a more expensive chip for less money. That squeezes their unit profit on both ends.
retrospooty - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
"This echoes what I have been saying about this generation. It is really all about clock speed increases. IPC is essentially the same."- This is a good thing. Stuck on 28nm for 4 years, moving to 16nm is exactly what Nvidias architecture needed.