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 ESTHitman
The final game in our 2016 benchmark suite is the 2016 edition of Hitman, the latest title in the stealth-action franchise. The game offers two rendering paths: DirectX 11 and DirectX 12, with the latter being the case of DirectX 12 being added after the fact. As with past Hitman games, the latest proves to have a good mix of scenery and high model counts to stress modern video cards.
Wrapping things up on the gaming side, we have Hitman. While several DX11 games have added DX12 over the last year, Hitman is perhaps the most interesting case both for driver optimization purposes, and just what the developers have been able to wring out. For the latest generation of cards, the game’s DX12 performance is more or less a wash; it’s not consistently better than DX11 in GPU-bound scenarios. However once we get CPU-bound, the threading and CPU overhead improvements of DX12 make themselves felt, improving performance on even the all-powerful GTX 1080 Ti at 1440p.
By the numbers then, under DX12 the GTX 1080 Ti picks up 24% over the GTX 1080, which is actually a smaller than average gain. Against the GTX 980 Ti however, NVIDIA’s latest card leads by 83%, making for a very strong generational improvement.
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SaolDan - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
i dont need it but i really want it. currently gaming and vr on a 1070 and loving it.Endda - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
Would have loved to see the Titan XP in those graphsRyan Smith - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
Unfortunately NVIDIA never sampled us on that one, so I don't have one on-hand to test again.Samus - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
Can't wait to pickup one of these in a year for ~$400. Easily future-proof for the next generation of console games, and my 780Ti is really showing its age, by about 154%...Nfarce - Friday, March 10, 2017 - link
If you think you are going to see a 1080Ti in 12 months selling for $400, I've got a like-new Ferrari to selling you for $15k. It will be nearly summer before the AIB GPUs (ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, etc.) start becoming available in decent supply.rtho782 - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
I know I'm an outlier, but having lived with SLI 980s for a couple of years I'm looking to go back to a single card, and I really wish I could find SLI 980 to 1080ti benchmarks :PDrumsticks - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
I think the original AT review of the 1080 compares them. Go there and just tack on another 30% maybe?mapesdhs - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link
If it's of any help, I've done a fair few 980 SLI tests for 3DMark, Unigine, etc., you could compare those to 1080 Ti reviews (several sites have included 3DMark results, and Techpowerup has a couple of Unigine results threads/tables); PM me for links, or email (Google "Ian SGI", find the Contact page, use my Yahoo address).Achaios - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
It should be borne in mind that Benchmark results are misleading, especially when referring to the 780TI.The 780TI launched at ridiculously low clocks of 875MHz Core Clock and 928 MHz Boost Clock, which wasn't much different from what a GTX 580 OC'd could do.
When overclocked, the 780TI worked at around 1.25 GHz, a huge difference over the stock card.
So, while the 1080TI has got more than double the performance of an OC'd 780TI as per 3D Mark Firestrike, the performance shown herein for the 780TI is ridiculously low and thus, misleading.
Yojimbo - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
I guess if you're worried about someone making judgments of general GPU trends without fully researching it, that's true. But owners of 780 Ti cards should be aware of where their individual cards sit compared to the reference design. In any case it's always going to be hairy taking overclocking performance into account when making judgments about generational trends. For instance, 2017 1060s and 1080s are going to be able to overclock better than 2016 1060s and 1080s. There's also a whole range of clock speeds that come out. Do you take the fastest or the average? If you take the average do you take the average of the SKUs or an average weighted by units sold? It's not so easy to get an accurate picture without a lot of work.