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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
161 Comments
View All Comments
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"?