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 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 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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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.