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
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?