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 ESTGPU 2016 Benchmark Suite & The Test
As this is the first high-end card release for 2016, we have gone ahead and updated our video card benchmarking suite. Unfortunately Broadwell-E launched just a bit too late for this review, so we’ll have to hold off on updating the underlying platform to Intel’s latest and greatest for a little while longer yet.
For the 2016 suite we have retained Grand Theft Auto V, Battlefield 4, and of course, Crysis 3. Joining these games are 6 new games: Rise of the Tomb Raider, DiRT Rally, Ashes of the Singularity, The Witcher 3, The Division, and the 2016 rendition of Hitman.
| AnandTech GPU Bench 2016 Game List | ||||
| Game | Genre | API(s) | ||
| Rise of the Tomb Raider | Action | DX11 | ||
| DiRT Rally | Racing | DX11 | ||
| Ashes of the Singularity | RTS | DX12 | ||
| Battlefield 4 | FPS | DX11 | ||
| Crysis 3 | FPS | DX11 | ||
| The Witcher 3 | RPG | DX11 | ||
| The Division | FPS | DX11 | ||
| Grand Theft Auto V | Action/Open World | DX11 | ||
| Hitman (2016) | Action/Stealth | DX11 + DX12 | ||
As was the case in 2015, the API used will be based on the best API available for a given card. Rise of the Tomb Raider and Hitman both support DirectX 11 + DirectX 12; in the case of Tomb Raider the DX12 path was until last week a regression – a new patch changed things too late for this article – and meanwhile the best API for Hitman depends on whether we’re looking at an AMD or NVIDIA card. For now Tomb Raider is benchmarked using DX11 and Hitman on both DX11 and DX12. Meanwhile Ashes of the Singularity is essentially tailor made for DirectX 12, as the first DX12 game to be designed for it as opposed to porting over a DX11 engine, so it is being run under DX12 at all times.
Meanwhile from a design standpoint our benchmark settings remain unchanged. For lower-end cards we’ll look at 1080p at various quality settings when practical, and for high-end cards we’ll be looking at 1080p and above at the highest quality settings.
The Test
As for our hardware testbed, it remains unchanged from 2015, being composed of an overclocked Core i7-4960X housed in an NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition case.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 AMD Radeon RX 480 AMD Radeon Fury X AMD Radeon R9 Nano AMD Radeon R9 390X AMD Radeon R9 390 AMD Radeon HD 7970 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 368.39 AMD Radeon Software Crimson 16.7.1 (RX 480) AMD Radeon Software Crimson 16.6.2 (All Others) |
| OS: | Windows 10 Pro |
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TestKing123 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Then you're woefully behind the times since other sites can do this better. If you're not able to re-run a benchmark for a game with a pretty significant patch like Tomb Raider, or a high profile game like Doom with a significant performance patch like Vulcan that's been out for over a week, then you're workflow is flawed and this site won't stand a chance against the other crop. I'm pretty sure you're seeing this already if you have any sort of metrics tracking in place.TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
So question, if you started this article on may 14th, was their no time in the over 2 months to add one game to that benchmark list?nathanddrews - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Seems like an official addendum is necessary at some point. Doom on Vulkan is amazing. Dota 2 on Vulkan is great, too (and would be useful in reviews of low end to mainstream GPUs especially). Talos... not so much.Eden-K121D - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Talos Principle was a proof of conceptajlueke - Friday, July 22, 2016 - link
http://www.pcgamer.com/doom-benchmarks-return-vulk...Addendum complete.
mczak - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
The table with the native FP throughput rates isn't correct on page 5. Either it's in terms of flops, then gp104 fp16 would be 1:64. Or it's in terms of hw instruction throughput - then gp100 would be 1:1. (Interestingly, the sandra numbers for half-float are indeed 1:128 - suggesting it didn't make any use of fp16 packing at all.)Ryan Smith - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Ahh, right you are. I was going for the FLOPs rate, but wrote down the wrong value. Thanks!As for the Sandra numbers, they're not super precise. But it's an obvious indication of what's going on under the hood. When the same CUDA 7.5 code path gives you wildly different results on Pascal, then you know something has changed...
BurntMyBacon - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
Did nVidia somehow limit the ability to promote FP16 operations to FP32? If not, I don't see the point in creating such a slow performing FP16 mode in the first place. Why waste die space when an intelligent designer can just promote the commands to get normal speeds out of the chip anyways? Sure you miss out on speed doubling through packing, but that is still much better than the 1/128 (1/64) rate you get using the provided FP16 mode.Scali - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
I think they can just do that in the shader compiler. Any FP16 operation gets replaced by an FP32 one.Only reading from buffers and writing to buffers with FP16 content should remain FP16. Then again, if their driver is smart enough, it can even promote all buffers to FP32 as well (as long as the GPU is the only one accessing the data, the actual representation doesn't matter. Only when the CPU also accesses the data, does it actually need to be FP16).
owan - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Only 2 months late and published the day after a different major GPU release. What happened to this place?