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 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.
Grand Theft Auto V is another game where the GTX 1080 Ti won’t quite reach 60fps at 4K with all the bells & whistles, but it gets close in doing so. Given that this was originally a console game that ran at 30fps, 51.1 should make a lot of people reasonably satisfied, but there’s always room for improvement.
Relative to the GTX 980 Ti, this is actually the GTX 1080 Ti’s best game; it picks up a better-than-average 83% in performance. I suspect that GTAV is an outlier that is especially memory bandwidth sensitive, benefitting from the combination of a raw 44% increase in memory bandwidth from the previous generation, and NVIDIA’s improved memory compression technology on the Pascal architecture.
Looking at the minimum framerates, the story is much the same. For gamers looking for high minimum framerates, the GTX 1080 Ti is the first card that can deliver better than 30fps at the 99th percentile. So while it can’t average 60fps, it also will never drop to the 30fps rate that its console counterparts are capped at in the first place.
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webdoctors - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
No, its because the dollar is worthless and real inflation is off the charts. Once we make the dollar great again, we'll see prices come down.eddman - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
The only reason that we had $500 cards is because of the fierce competition from ATI back then.Whenever ATI's cards couldn't compete, or could but were not launched yet, nvidia jacked the prices up. I don't know why people forget the $600 8800 GTX or $650 GTX 280. Take a look at the link I posted above.
mapesdhs - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link
What I miss is being able to buy a couple of well-priced mid-range cards that beat the high-end, with good scaling. I couldn't afford the 580 when it was new, but 2x 460 SLI was faster and served nicely for a good while. With support & optimisations moving away from SLI/CF though (lesser gains, more stuttering, costly connectors, unlock codes, etc.), a single good GPU is more attractive, but the cost way up the scale compared to 5 years ago.Have a look at the Anand review for the 280 though, it shows what I mean: 2x 8800GT SLI was faster than the 280, but $200 cheaper and with excellent scaling. I had 2x 8800GT 1GB before switching to the two 460s. Today, mid-range cards don't even support SLI (GTX 1060).
Ian.
Meteor2 - Tuesday, March 14, 2017 - link
What about two RX480s? Can they top a 1080?aryonoco - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
The 780 Ti was released in November 2013.The 1080 Ti is being released now, in March 2017.
So 3.5 years later, Nvidia's flagship consumer card has improved 260% while using pretty much the same amount of power and generating pretty much the same level of noise.
If this continues, I can see that in the next few years, all sort of software will find a way to utilise the GPU more, not just games and neural networks.
Nvidia has a lot to be proud of. Their execution in the past few years has been Apple-esque.
Meteor2 - Friday, March 10, 2017 - link
Reflected in their share price!virtuastro - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
@Ryan SmithCan you test Intel i7 7700K, Intel-E Processors, and Ryzen 7 1800x with a GTX 1080ti in benchmark? :)
Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
Unfortunately no. We don't have a central office; I'm in the US with the GPUs, and Ian is in the UK with the CPUs. He's working on game testing for Ryzen Part 2, but we likely won't be able to include the GTX 1080 Ti.virtuastro - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
Aw dang. Thanks for answer anyway. :DMeteor2 - Friday, March 10, 2017 - link
FedEx?