DiRT Rally

For the racing game in our benchmark suite we have Codemasters’ DiRT Rally. Codemasters continues to set the bar for graphical fidelity in racing games, delivering realistic looking environments with layered with additional graphical effects. Based on their in-house EGO engine, DiRT Rally includes a number of DirectCompute based compute shader effects, and while it’s not the most punishing game in our suite, it still takes a very good card to sustain the 60fps frame rate that driving games are best played at.

DiRT Rally - 3840x2160 - Ultra Quality

DiRT Rally - 2560x1440 - Ultra Quality

DiRT Rally - 1920x1080 - Ultra Quality

Once again, the GTX 1080 is uncontested. Better still, it can crack 60fps at 4K, so gamers there won’t need to make any tradeoffs. And 1440p gamers with high refresh rate monitors should find that the card can come reasonably close to their refresh rate limit.

GTX 1070 is in turn solidly in second place, coming in around 4% ahead of the GTX 980 Ti. However because it’s targeting a level of performance only slightly ahead of the best of the last generation cards, we do see the 28nm Radeon Fury X hang on decently well at 4K, before the GTX 1070 pulls farther ahead at lower resolutions.

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  • Ninhalem - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    There's 32 freaking pages in this review. Maybe people have other jobs instead of writing all day long. Did you ever think of that?

    I'll take quality and a long publishing time over crap and rushing out the door.
  • Stuka87 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    Thanks for the extremely in depth review Ryan!
  • cknobman - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    I cannot help feel just a bit underwhelmed.

    Of course these Nvidia cards kick some major butt in games that have always favored Nvidia but I noticed that in games not specifically coded to take advantage of Nvidia and furthermore games with DX12 that these cards performance advantage is minimal at best vs an old Fury X with half the video RAM.

    Then when you take into account Vulcan API and newer DX12 games (which can be found elsewhere) you see that the prices for these cards is a tad ridiculous and the performance advantage starts to melt away.

    I am waiting for AMD to release their next "big gun" before I make a purchase decision.
    I'm rocking a 4k monitor right now and 60fps at that resolution is my target.
  • nathanddrews - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    1080 is close to being that 4K60 card, but can't quite cut it. I'm waiting for "Big Vega" vs 1080Ti before dropping any money.
  • lefty2 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    Great review - one of the few that highlights the fact the Pascal async compute is only half as good as AMD's version. Async compute is a key feature for increasing performance in DX12 and Vulkan and that's going to allow the RX 480 to perform well against the GTX 1060
  • Daniel Egger - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    "... why the memory controller organization of GP104 is 8x32b instead of 4x64b like GM204"

    Sounds like it's the other way around.
  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    No, that's correct. 8 32bit wide controllers rather than 4 64bit wide controllers.

    http://images.anandtech.com/doci/10325/GeForce_GTX...

    http://images.anandtech.com/doci/8526/GeForce_GTX_...
  • DominionSeraph - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    >It has taken about 2 years longer than we’d normally see

    ... for a review of a flagship card to come out
  • sgeocla - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    The old Maxwell was so optimized it was always full and didn't even need Async Compute. The new Pascal is so much more optimized that it even has time to create the "holes" in execution (not counting the ones in your pocket) that were "missing" in the old architecture to be able to benefit for Async Compute. Expect Volta to create even more holes (with hardware support) for Async Compute to fill.
  • tipoo - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    That's demonstrably untrue.

    http://www.futuremark.com/pressreleases/a-closer-l...

    Plenty of holes that could have been filled in Maxwell.

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