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 ESTDriver Performance & The Test
Alongside the launch of the GTX 1080 Ti, NVIDIA is also touting the performance of their drivers. For most users who have been regularly updating their drivers to begin with, I don’t think there’s anything too surprising here. But because of NVIDIA’s talk of driver performance gains, I’ve already seen some confusion here over whether the GTX 1080 Ti launch driver (378.78) is a special performance driver or not. For the record, it is not.
In their presentation, NVIDIA outlined their driver performance gains in DX12 since the launch of various DX12 games, including Ashes of the Singularity, Hitman, and Rise of the Tomb Raider. All of these games have seen performance improvements, but what’s critical here is that this is over the long-run, since the launch of the GTX 1080 and these respective games.
The 378.78 driver in that respect is nothing special. In terms of driver release, NVIDIA is already a few releases into the R378 branch, so any big code changes for this branch have already been released to the public in earlier driver builds.
In any case, for reference purposes, here’s how performance of the GTX 1080 stacks up now compared to performance at launch.
| GeForce GTX Driver Performance Gains: July 2016 vs. March 2017 (4K) | |||
| Game | GTX 1080 | GTX 980 Ti | |
| Rise of the Tomb Raider |
Even
|
Even
|
|
| DiRT Rally |
+8%
|
+7%
|
|
| Ashes of the Singularity |
+11%
|
+14%
|
|
| Battlefield 4 |
Even
|
Even
|
|
| Crysis 3 |
Even
|
Even
|
|
| The Witcher 3 |
|
Even
|
|
| The Division* |
-7%
|
-9%
|
|
| Grand Theft Auto V |
+2%
|
Even
|
|
| Hitman (DX12) |
+26%
|
+24%
|
|
As was the case with NVIDIA’s data, the performance gains vary from game to game. Some games have not budged, whereas others like Hitman have improved significantly, and outlier The Division has actually regressed a bit due to some major updates that have happened to the game in the same time period. But at the end of the day, these are performance gains that have accumulated over the months and are already available in the latest drivers from NVIDIA.
The Test
For our review of the GTX 1080 Ti, we’re using NVIDIA’s 378.78 driver.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti AMD Radeon Fury X |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 378.78 AMD Radeon Software Crimson 17.3.1 |
| OS: | Windows 10 Pro |
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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.