The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founder's Edition Review: Bigger Pascal for Better Performance
by Ryan Smith on March 9, 2017 9:00 AM ESTHitman
The final game in our 2016 benchmark suite is the 2016 edition of Hitman, the latest title in the stealth-action franchise. The game offers two rendering paths: DirectX 11 and DirectX 12, with the latter being the case of DirectX 12 being added after the fact. As with past Hitman games, the latest proves to have a good mix of scenery and high model counts to stress modern video cards.
Wrapping things up on the gaming side, we have Hitman. While several DX11 games have added DX12 over the last year, Hitman is perhaps the most interesting case both for driver optimization purposes, and just what the developers have been able to wring out. For the latest generation of cards, the game’s DX12 performance is more or less a wash; it’s not consistently better than DX11 in GPU-bound scenarios. However once we get CPU-bound, the threading and CPU overhead improvements of DX12 make themselves felt, improving performance on even the all-powerful GTX 1080 Ti at 1440p.
By the numbers then, under DX12 the GTX 1080 Ti picks up 24% over the GTX 1080, which is actually a smaller than average gain. Against the GTX 980 Ti however, NVIDIA’s latest card leads by 83%, making for a very strong generational improvement.
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funkforce - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
I've given Ryan a LOT of heat for the last years complete lack of or very late reviews.But I'm also one to give credit where credit is due.
Amazing review Ryan, this rabbit you pulled you should be really proud of and the fact that you didn't hurt yourself on some motherboard or screwdriver and got it done on launch is really remarkable. Quite surprising as I'd thought Anandtech would start to do less PC hardware reviews and focus more on mobile.
Really amazing work and finally back to the highest of standard, quality and timely reviews that Anand was known for. This great work is what I think he saw in you, and I hope you can keep it up and keep AT at this level as "the bench" which all other reviews are measured!
Thank you!
CrazyElf - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
Cool review! Thanks for the lauch day.I think everyone knew exactly how this was going to perform, as it was pretty much a TItan, less 1 GB of GDDR5X (although a bit faster due to newer bins) and 88 rather than 96 ROPs. Otherwise largely identical.
Let's hope AMD has a good response in Vega.
MajGenRelativity - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
The timeliness of this review has been great, but I was wondering about reviews for any of the Polaris family, especially the 480 and 460. I know there was a preview on the 480, but are there any plans to do a full review on any of the parts?Meteor2 - Friday, March 10, 2017 - link
The 'preview' of the RX 480 wasn't really any less detailed than this review, it's just missing compute and synthetic benchmarks. Plenty of detail on the background to the card and the architecture.ElBerryKM13 - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
Cmon anandtech? no Pascal Titan X benchmarks to see how it compares to this 1080ti? are you serious?Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/comments/11180/the-nvidia...jiffylube1024 - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
Whoah, what a monster card!HomeworldFound - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
It would've been nice to test more modern games than that, at least introduce Resident Evil 7 etc. Of course a new high end card is going to play old games better....Holliday75 - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
And a newer card will play newer games better as well.Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
We'll be refreshing the benchmark suite for Vega, that way we go into a new architecture with equally new games.