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 ESTAshes of the Singularity
Sorely missing from our benchmark suite for quite some time have been RTSes, which don’t enjoy quite the popularity they once did. As a result Ashes holds a special place in our hearts, and that’s before we talk about the technical aspects. Based on developer Oxide Games’ Nitrous Engine, Ashes has been designed from the ground up for low-level APIs like DirectX 12. As a result of all of the games in our benchmark suite, this is the game making the best use of DirectX 12’s various features, from asynchronous compute to multi-threadeded work submission and high batch counts. What we see can’t be extrapolated to all DirectX 12 games, but it gives us a very interesting look at what we might expect in the future.
Of all of the games in our benchmark suite, Ashes is perhaps the most unusual. Besides being built for low-level APIs like DirectX 12 from the start, its rendering optimizations scale very well with resolution. As a result it takes a lot of rendering power to play Ashes with all the bells & whistles turned on, but once you can reach that point, going to 4K isn’t too much harder.
In any case, the GTX 1080 Ti becomes the first card to crack 60fps at 4K in this game. In doing so it’s 27% faster than the GTX 1080, and 71% faster than the GTX 980 Ti. Performance has actually reached a point that if we drop to 1440p, we start being CPU-limited a not-insignificant percentage of the time. So the GTX 1080 Ti outright needs 4K to really put its best foot forward.
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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.