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 ESTDesigning GP104: Running Up the Clocks
So if GP104’s per-unit throughput is identical to GM204, and the SM count has only been increased from 2048 to 2560 (25%), then what makes GTX 1080 60-70% faster than GTX 980? The answer there is that instead of vastly increasing the number of functional units for GP104 or increasing per-unit throughput, NVIDIA has instead opted to significantly raise the GPU clockspeed. And this in turn goes back to the earlier discussion on TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process.
With every advancement in fab technology, chip designers have been able to increase their clockspeeds thanks to the basic physics at play. However because TSMC’s 16nm node adds FinFETs for the first time, it’s extra special. What’s happening here is a confluence of multiple factors, but at the most basic level the introduction of FinFETs means that the entire voltage/frequency curve gets shifted. The reduced leakage and overall “stronger” FinFET transistors can run at higher clockspeeds at lower voltages, allowing for higher overall clockspeeds at the same (or similar) power consumption. We see this effect to some degree with every node shift, but it’s especially potent when making the shift from planar to FinFET, as has been the case for the jump from 28nm to 16nm.
Given the already significant one-off benefits of such a large jump in the voltage/frequency curve, for Pascal NVIDIA has decided to fully embrace the idea and run up the clocks as much as is reasonably possible. At an architectural level this meant going through the design to identify bottlenecks in the critical paths – logic sections that couldn’t run at as high a frequency as NVIDIA would have liked – and reworking them to operate at higher frequencies. As GPUs typically (and still are) relatively low clocked, there’s not as much of a need to optimize critical paths in this matter, but with NVIDIA’s loftier clockspeed goals for Pascal, this changed things.
From an implementation point of view this isn’t the first time that NVIDIA has pushed for high clockspeeds, as most recently the 40nm Fermi architecture incorporated a double-pumped shader clock. However this is the first time NVIDIA has attempted something similar since they reined in their power consumption with Kepler (and later Maxwell). Having learned their lesson the hard way with Fermi, I’m told a lot more care went into matters with Pascal in order to avoid the power penalties NVIDIA paid with Fermi, exemplified by things such as only adding flip-flops where truly necessary.
Meanwhile when it comes to the architectural impact of designing for high clockspeeds, the results seem minimal. While NVIDIA does not divulge full information on the pipeline of a CUDA core, all of the testing I’ve run indicates that the latency (in clock cycles) of the CUDA cores is identical to Maxwell. Which goes hand in hand with earlier observations about throughput. So although optimizations were made to the architecture to improve clockspeeds, it doesn’t look like NVIDIA has made any more extreme optimizations (e.g. pipeline lengthening) that detectably reduces Pascal’s per-clock performance.
Finally, more broadly speaking, while this is essentially a one-time trick for NVIDIA, it’s an interesting route for them to go. By cranking up their clockspeeds in this fashion, they avoid any real scale-out issues, at least for the time being. Although graphics are the traditional embarrassingly parallel problem, even a graphical workload is subject to some degree of diminishing returns as GPUs scale farther out. A larger number of SMs is more difficult to fill, not every aspect of the rendering process is massively parallel (shadow maps being a good example), and ever-increasing pixel shader lengths compound the problem. Admittedly NVIDIA’s not seeing significant scale-out issues quite yet, but this is why GTX 980 isn’t quite twice as fast as GTX 960, for example.
Just increasing the clockspeed, comparatively speaking, means that the entire GPU gets proportionally faster without shifting the resource balance; the CUDA cores are 43% faster, the geometry frontends are 43% faster, the ROPs are 43% faster, etc. The only real limitation in this regard isn’t the GPU itself, but whether you can adequately feed it. And this is where GDDR5X comes into play.
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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.