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 ESTRise of the Tomb Raider
Starting things off in our benchmark suite is the built-in benchmark for Rise of the Tomb Raider, the latest iteration in the long-running action-adventure gaming series. One of the unique aspects of this benchmark is that it’s actually the average of 4 sub-benchmarks that fly through different environments, which keeps the benchmark from being too weighted towards a GPU’s performance characteristics under any one scene.
As we’re looking at the highest of high-end cards here, the performance comparisons are pretty straightforward. There’s the GTX 1080 Ti versus the GTX 1080, and then for owners with older cards looking for an upgrade, there’s the GTX 1080 Ti versus the GTX 980 Ti and GTX 780 Ti. It goes without saying that the GTX 1080 Ti is the fastest card that is (or tomorrow will be) on the market, so the only outstanding question is just how much faster NVIDIA’s latest card really is.
As you’d expect, the GTX 1080 Ti’s performance lead is dependent in part on the resolution tested. The higher the resolution the more GPU-bound a game is, and the more opportunity there is for the card to stretch its 3GB advantage in VRAM. In the case of Tomb Raider, the GTX 1080 Ti ends up being 33% faster than the GTX 1080 at 4K, and 26% faster at 1440p.
Otherwise against the 28nm GTX 980 Ti and GTX 780 Ti, the performance gains become very large very quickly. The GTX 1080 Ti holds a 70% lead over the GTX 980 here at 4K, and it’s a full 2.6x faster than the GTX 780 Ti. The end result is that whereas the GTX 980 Ti was the first card to crack 30fps at 4K on Tomb Raider, the GTX 1080 Ti is the first card that can actually average 60fps or better.
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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.