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 ESTCrysis 3
Still one of our most punishing benchmarks 3 years later, Crysis 3 needs no introduction. Crytek’s DX11 masterpiece, Crysis 3’s Very High settings still punish even the best of video cards, never mind the rest. Along with its high performance requirements, Crysis 3 is a rather balanced game in terms of power consumption and vendor optimizations. As a result it can give us a good look at how our video cards stack up on average, and later on in this article how power consumption plays out.
This being the first cycle we’ve used the Very High settings, it’s humorous to see a $700 video card getting 35fps on a 3 year old game. Very High settings give Crysis 3 a level of visual quality many games still can’t match, but the tradeoff is that it obliterates most video cards. We’re probably still 3-4 years out from a video card that can run at 4K with 4x MSAA at 60fps, never mind accomplishing that without the MSAA.
The GTX 1080 does however at least get the distinction of being the one and only card to crack 30fps at 4K. Though 30fps is not suggested for Crysis, it can legitimately claim to be the only card that can even handle the game at 4K with a playable framerate at this time. Otherwise if we turn down the resolution, the GTX 1080 is now the only card to crack 60fps at 1440p. Very close to that mark though is the GTX 1070, which at 58.1fps is a small overclock away from 60fps.
Looking at the generational comparisons, GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 lead by a bit less than usual, at 62% and 51% respectively. The GTX 1080/1070 gap on the other hand is pretty typical, with the GTX 1080 leading by 27% at 4K, 23% at 1440p, and 21% at 1080p.
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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?