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 ESTRise of the Tomb Raider
Starting things off in our benchmark suite is the built-in benchmark for Rise of the Tomb Raider, the latest iteration in the long-running action-adventure gaming series. One of the unique aspects of this benchmark is that it’s actually the average of 4 sub-benchmarks that fly through different environments, which keeps the benchmark from being too weighted towards a GPU’s performance characteristics under any one scene.
To kick things off then, while I picked the benchmark order before collecting the performance results, it’s neat that Rise of the Tomb Raider ends up being a fairly consistent representation of how the various video cards compare to each other. The end result, as you might expect, puts the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 solidly in the lead. And truthfully there’s no reason for it to be anything but this; NVIDIA does not face any competition from AMD at the high-end at this point, so the two GP104 cards are going to be unrivaled. It’s not a question of who wins, but by how much.
Overall we find the GTX 1080 ahead of its predecessor, the GTX 980, by anywhere between 60% and 78%, with the lead increasing with the resolution. The GTX 1070’s lead isn’t quite as significant though, ranging from 53% to 60#. This is consistent with the fact that the GTX 1070 is specified to trail the GTX 1080 by more than we saw with the 980/970 in 2014, which means that in general the GTX 1070 won’t see quite as much uplift.
What we do get however is confirmation that the GTX 1070FE is a GTX 980 Ti and more. The performance of what was NVIDIA’s $650 flagship can now be had in a card that costs $450, and with any luck will get cheaper still as supplies improve. For 1440p gamers this should hit a good spot in terms of performance.
Otherwise when it comes to 4K gaming, NVIDIA has made a lot of progress thanks to GTX 1080, but even their latest and greatest card isn’t quite going to crack 60fps here. We haven’t yet escaped having to made quality tradeoffs for 4K at this time, and it’s likely that future games will drive that point home even more.
Finally, 1080p is admittedly here largely for the sake of including much older cards like the GTX 680, to show what kind of progress NVIDIA has made since their first 28nm high-end card. The result? A 4.25x performance increase over the GTX 680.
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TestKing123 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Sorry, too little too late. Waited this long, and the first review was Tomb Raider DX11?! Not 12?This review is both late AND rushed at the same time.
Mat3 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Testing Tomb Raider in DX11 is inexcusable.http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/231481-rise-of-t...
TheJian - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
Furyx still loses to 980ti until 4K at which point the avg for both cards is under 30fps, and the mins are both below 20fps. IE, neither is playable. Even in AMD's case here we're looking at 7% gain (75.3 to 80.9). Looking at NV's new cards shows dx12 netting NV cards ~6% while AMD gets ~12% (time spy). This is pretty much a sneeze and will as noted here and elsewhere, it will depend on the game and how the gpu works. It won't be a blanket win for either side. Async won't be saving AMD, they'll have to actually make faster stuff. There is no point in even reporting victory at under 30fps...LOL.Also note in that link, while they are saying maxwell gained nothing, it's not exactly true. Only avg gained nothing (suggesting maybe limited by something else?), while min fps jumped pretty much exactly what AMD did. IE Nv 980ti min went from 56fps to 65fps. So while avg didn't jump, the min went way up giving a much smoother experience (amd gained 11fps on mins from 51 to 62). I'm more worried about mins than avgs. Tomb on AMD still loses by more than 10% so who cares? Sort of blows a hole in the theory that AMD will be faster in all dx12 stuff...LOL. Well maybe when you force the cards into territory nobody can play at (4k in Tomb Raiders case).
It would appear NV isn't spending much time yet on dx12, and they shouldn't. Even with 10-20% on windows 10 (I don't believe netmarketshare's numbers as they are a msft partner), most of those are NOT gamers. You can count dx12 games on ONE hand. Most of those OS's are either forced upgrades due to incorrect update settings (waking up to win10...LOL), or FREE on machine's under $200 etc. Even if 1/4 of them are dx12 capable gpus, that would be NV programming for 2.5%-5% of the PC market. Unlike AMD they were not forced to move on to dx12 due to lack of funding. AMD placed a bet that we'd move on, be forced by MSFT or get console help from xbox1 (didn't work, ps4 winning 2-1) so they could ignore dx11. Nvidia will move when needed, until then they're dominating where most of us are, which is 1080p or less, and DX11. It's comic when people point to AMD winning at 4k when it is usually a case where both sides can't hit 30fps even before maxing details. AMD management keeps aiming at stuff we are either not doing at all (4k less than 2%), or won't be doing for ages such as dx12 games being more than dx11 in your OS+your GPU being dx12 capable.
What is more important? Testing the use case that describes 99.9% of the current games (dx11 or below, win7/8/vista/xp/etc), or games that can be counted on ONE hand and run in an OS most of us hate. No hate isn't a strong word here when the OS has been FREE for a freaking year and still can't hit 20% even by a microsoft partner's likely BS numbers...LOL. Testing dx12 is a waste of time. I'd rather see 3-4 more dx11 games tested for a wider variety although I just read a dozen reviews to see 30+ games tested anyway.
ajlueke - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
That would be fine if it was only dx12. Doesn't look like Nvidia is investing much time in Vulkan either, especially not on older hardware.http://www.pcgamer.com/doom-benchmarks-return-vulk...
Cygni - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Cool attention troll. Nobody cares what free reviews you choose to read or why.AndrewJacksonZA - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Typo on page 18: "The Test""Core i7-4960X hosed in an NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition" Hosed -> Housed
Michael Bay - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
I`d sure hose me a Core i7-4960X.AndrewJacksonZA - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
@Ryan & team: What was your reasoning for not including the new Doom in your 2016 GPU Bench game list? AFAIK it's the first indication of Vulkan performance for graphics cards.Thank you! :-)
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
We cooked up the list and locked in the games before Doom came out. It wasn't out until May 13th. GTX 1080 came out May 14th, by which point we had already started this article (and had published the preview).AndrewJacksonZA - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
OK, thank you. Any chance of adding it to the list please?I'm a Windows gamer, so my personal interest in the cross-platform Vulkan is pretty meh right now (only one title right now, hooray! /s) but there are probably going to be some devs are going to choose it over DX12 for that very reason, plus I'm sure that you have readers who are quite interested in it.