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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mapesdhs - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link
It would be delayed for a month by their Customs lunacy. :DMeteor2 - Tuesday, March 14, 2017 - link
I'd love to see an Anandtech investigation of what pairings of CPU and GPU really do give the best FPS/price ratio. Could a 1080 Ti bottleneck an i5, for an example? Would a 7600 be ok but a 2500 choke?Gc - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti ...."Ti" is a clever marketing name for a penultimate card.
11GB further emphasizes that it is leading buyers toward the ultimate.
Ranger1065 - Friday, March 10, 2017 - link
Great review, well done Anandtech.TheJian - Friday, March 10, 2017 - link
Should be interesting to see how AMD does with 8GB for Vega.Looks like the best Vega can hope for is a tie and they themselves (Raja) said they only had enough software engineers to be working on Vulkan drivers. So that means Dx11/OpenGL and possible DX12 won't be very good, or could take ages to catch up if AMD doesn't make some money to hire more people. I really hope Vega launch doesn't end up like Ryzen (motherboards all over the place having issues, and SMT etc issues in games). I think I'll wait out Vega and maybe even 1080r2 with GDDR5x & faster clocks before jumping. Also have to wait for AMD to fix ryzen if they can. At least the motherboard part, as sites like PCper think the game part will stay the same forever. AMD talking Ryzen rev2 already (that fixes things) makes me think PCper etc are correct.
Still, an exciting time for hardware and a great time to buy a PC this year. Even the low end is getting a major boost probably. The 1060 is low to me no point in spending under $200 if you want to really game IMHO, faster speeds, GDDR5x, could be interesting. That combo could make a really great HTPC. I wonder how much faster 1060 will get. Pity it seems AMD has no access to GDDR5x as nvidia is using it all.
Just read Hardocp's review, 30-35% faster than 1080. Much the same as here. AMD has a rough road ahead (so do their shareholders). That said, competition is good :)
Ken_g6 - Friday, March 10, 2017 - link
Hm, 11GB RAM, 11Gbps, 11.3 TFLOPs. Why do I get the impression Marketing wanted to use the phrase "goes to eleven" for this card? Did they announce it with Spinal Tap music?Ryan Smith - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link
They did not. Though clearly they should have.mapesdhs - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link
Even SGI did this. IIRC:"audiopanel -spinaltap"
Changes the scale to 11. :D
oranos - Friday, March 10, 2017 - link
pretty meh if you own a gtx 1080 already. higher TDP, lower base clocks.justaviking - Friday, March 10, 2017 - link
30% faster is "meh"?