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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patrickjp93 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
That doesn't actually support your point...Scali - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Did I read a different article?Because the article that I read said that the 'holes' would be pretty similar on Maxwell v2 and Pascal, given that they have very similar architectures. However, Pascal is more efficient at filling the holes with its dynamic repartitioning.
mr.techguru - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Just Ordered the MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Gaming X , way better than 1060 / 480. NVidia Nail it :)tipoo - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
" NVIDIA tells us that it can be done in under 100us (0.1ms), or about 170,000 clock cycles."Is my understanding right that Polaris, and I think even earlier with late GCN parts, could seamlessly interleave per-clock? So 170,000 times faster than Pascal in clock cycles (less in total time, but still above 100,000 times faster)?
Scali - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
That seems highly unlikely. Switching to another task is going to take some time, because you also need to switch all the registers, buffers, caches need to be re-filled etc.The only way to avoid most of that is to duplicate the whole register file, like HyperThreading does. That's doable on an x86 CPU, but a GPU has way more registers.
Besides, as we can see, nVidia's approach is fast enough in practice. Why throw tons of silicon on making context switching faster than it needs to be? You want to avoid context switches as much as possible anyway.
Sadly AMD doesn't seem to go into any detail, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be in the same ballpark.
My guess is that what AMD calls an 'ACE' is actually very similar to the SMs and their command queues on the Pascal side.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Task switching is separate from interleaving. Interleaving takes place on all GPUs as a basic form of latency hiding (GPUs are very high latency).The big difference is that interleaving uses different threads from the same task; task switching by its very nature loads up another task entirely.
Scali - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
After re-reading AMD's asynchronous shader PDF, it seems that AMD also speaks of 'interleaving' when they switch a graphics CU to a compute task after the graphics task has completed. So 'interleaving' at task level, rather than at instruction level.Which would be pretty much the same as NVidia's Dynamic Load Balancing in Pascal.
eddman - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
The more I read about async computing in Polaris and Pascal, the more I realize that the implementations are not much different.As Ryan pointed out, it seems that the reason that Polaris, and GCN as a whole, benefit more from async is the architecture of the GPU itself, being wider and having more ALUs.
Nonetheless, I'm sure we're still going to see comments like "Polaris does async in hardware. Pascal is hopeless with its software async hack".
Matt Doyle - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Typo in the lead sentence of HPC vs. Consumer: Divergence paragraph: "Pascal in an architecture that...""is" instead of "in"
Matt Doyle - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Feeding Pascal page, "GDDR5X uses a 16n prefetch, which is twice the size of GDDR5’s 8n prefect."Prefect = prefetch