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 ESTGrand Theft Auto V
The latest edition of Rockstar’s venerable series of open world action games, Grand Theft Auto V was originally released to the last-gen consoles back in 2013. However thanks to a rather significant facelift for the current-gen consoles and PCs, along with the ability to greatly turn up rendering distances and add other features like MSAA and more realistic shadows, the end result is a game that is still among the most stressful of our benchmarks when all of its features are turned up. Furthermore, in a move rather uncharacteristic of most open world action games, Grand Theft Auto also includes a very comprehensive benchmark mode, giving us a great chance to look into the performance of an open world action game.
On a quick note about settings, as Grand Theft Auto V doesn't have pre-defined settings tiers, I want to quickly note what settings we're using. For "Very High" quality we have all of the primary graphics settings turned up to their highest setting, with the exception of grass, which is at its own very high setting. Meanwhile 4x MSAA is enabled for direct views and reflections. This setting also involves turning on some of the advanced redering features - the game's long shadows, high resolution shadows, and high definition flight streaming - but it not increasing the view distance any further.
Otherwise for "High" quality we take the same basic settings but turn off all MSAA, which significantly reduces the GPU rendering and VRAM requirements.
GTA V is another game that in recent times has favored NVIDIA GPUs, and as a result the GTX 1080 enjoys a solid standing here. At 61.4fps, the card becomes the first card to crack 60fps at 4K, albeit at only High quality. For very high quality, it becomes the first card to crack 30fps, both reinforcing how much of an improvement the card is over the previous generation and at the same time highlighting that it’s still going to have to make quality tradeoffs for 60fps at 4K.
Second to only the GTX 1080 is of course the GTX 1070. 4K is arguably out of the question, but at 1440p it can do just better than 60fps, making it the second card to do so. And though largely symbolic, it manages to do so when the GTX 980 Ti could not.
Looking at the generational improvements, GTA shows slightly better than average scaling with the new Pascal cards. GTX 1080 holds a anywhere between a 61% and 71% lead over the GTX 980, with particularly good gains above 1080p. Meanwhile GTX 1070 averages just shy of 60% over its GTX 970 counterpart.
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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.