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ToolsThis merely happens once in a while. In fact, the final time we saw this was way back in 2012 with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680, in parallel with Nvidia ‘s establish of its “ Kepler ” architecture. We ‘re not here to talk about Kepler, though. We ‘re here to discuss the new kid in town. That ‘s Nvidia ‘s brand-spanking-new chip architecture, named “ Pascal. ”
The GeForce GTX 1080 is the first Pascal-based GPU aimed at gamers. It ‘s built on a 16-nanometer ( new mexico ) serve using “ 3D ” FinFET transistors, and according to Nvidia it ‘s “ the newfangled king ” of the GPU universe. That ‘s surely a bold claim, but as our benchmarks show, it is, indeed, the fastest gambling GPU we ‘ve ever tested.
You Can Trust Our Reviews
Since 1982, PCMag has tested and rated thousands of products to help you make better buy decisions. ( See how we test. ) The king-making claim besides is n’t wholly storm, since every clock time a fresh GPU with a new computer architecture launches, it ‘s broadly faster than what preceded it. But this clock around it ‘s about shock precisely how fast it is, and how big the jump. You ‘ll have to see the benchmark tests we ran to believe it … sol let ‘s get started .
How We Got Here
Before we dive into Pascal, let ‘s take a brief walk down memory lane to understand how we arrived at this juncture in GPU history .
back in 2012, Nvidia launched its “ Kepler ” architecture, which marked the company ‘s leap from a 40nm silicon fabrication procedure to a much smaller 28nm process. ( This figure in nanometers is basically the size of the transistors used in the graphics-processor silicon. ) When this number goes down, it ‘s a big softwood, and this consequence is known as a “ die shrivel. ” As the size of the transistors gets smaller, thanks to advancements in manufacturing engineering, it allows Nvidia ( or its rival AMD ) to pack a lot more transistors into the lapp size die it was using previously. That allows it to improve operation without being lazy and good creating a bigger silicon die .
once Kepler had finished its guide in the market, everyone expected Nvidia to do what it had always done in the past, which is to shrink its fabrication action again. ( Nvidia does n’t actually make the silicon itself, but barely stick with us here. ) That expected drop would have been from 28nm down to 20nm, and the expectation was that the company would announce a brand-new GPU using the fresh, smaller action. That did n’t happen, and an official explanation was never given as to why. But rather of shrinking its process, Nvidia soldiered on with the like 28nm die it used to make Kepler cards for its successor series, which was named “ Maxwell. ”
interestingly, rival AMD did precisely the lapp thing, continuing on with its 28nm GPUs for a irregular overshoot, besides. So there must have been diminishing returns at 20nm that made it a fritter ‘s errand to pursue. Or possibly there was a trouble with the silicon manufacturers themselves ( TSMC, in the case of this circuit board ) being able to keep up with demand, alongside the push for smartphone chips and other in-demand devices. Though Nvidia ‘s Maxwell architecture was indeed a distribute faster and more effective than Kepler, it was due to savvy engineering and the adulthood of the 28nm work. Maxwell was excellent for its time, but it never quite achieved the same breakthrough in performance that normally accompanies a die psychiatrist .
now that Maxwell has finished its run, Nvidia has gone ahead and moved to a modern fabrication march, this time going all the way down to 16nm. As a two-generation leap from 28nm, 16nm is allowing Nvidia to make radical improvements in both performance and efficiency. The first base 16nm gaming poster to hit the grocery store is the GeForce GTX 1080 we are reviewing today. It ‘s the first base card to land in our test bed that was made using the all-new process and Nvidia ‘s “ Pascal ” architecture .
Inside Pascal
Nvidia ‘s Pascal GPU not alone uses a smaller 16nm process than Maxwell, but it besides uses a newer type of transistor, named FinFET. With FinFET, transistors get stacked in 3D space, as opposed to laying them down side-by-side. Just like the 3D NAND we ‘ve seen in Samsung SSDs, such as the Samsung SSD 850 Pro, this allows Nvidia to pack more transistors into a smaller area than it ever has ahead. And more transistors in the like space typically equals better performance .
just how many more transistors ? In the case of the GeForce GTX 1080, it ‘s two billion more … yes, with a “ B. ” The previous-generation equivalent to the GeForce GTX 1080 card, the GeForce GTX 980, sported 5.2 billion transistors. The GeForce GTX 1080 has 7.2 billion, evening though the size of the die remains unchanged .
What ‘s perplex is that despite having that many more transistors, the thermal plan power ( TDP ) military rank for the GeForce GTX 1080 is merely 15 watts higher than that of the GeForce GTX 980. ( It ‘s rated as consuming 180 watts, compared to the GeForce GTX 980 ‘s 165 watt. ) What ‘s even more incredible is that the GeForce GTX 1080 should be signally more herculean than the GeForce GTX 980, with very short “ monetary value ” in terms of the power required .
foster validation of Pascal ‘s department of energy efficiency is the fact that the GeForce GTX 1080 requires just one eight-pin PCI Express might connection off your system ‘s office supply, as opposed to the double six-pin connectors that the GeForce GTX 980 demands. This is the first flagship GPU we ‘ve ever seen that uses entirely one power connection .
Another profit of Nvidia ‘s transition from 28nm transistors to the new 16nm FinFET process is a dramatic addition in possible clock speeds. The Kepler and Maxwell cards ‘ clock speeds typically hovered around 1GHz or so, with the periodic nick able to hit 1.3GHz or 1.4GHz. But with the GeForce GTX 1080, the base—mind you, base—clock speed is a stagger 1.6GHz, with a hike clock able to hit 1.73GHz under certain conditions. Nvidia is always a bit button-down with citing the ceiling of these baseline clocks, excessively, so we can expect the cards to go much higher than this. At the launch of the card Nvidia said squeezing an extra 300MHz or so out of a GTX 1080 would be no boastfully deal, and it showed a menu running at 2.1GHz on the stock certificate cool american samoa well. We were n’t quite able to eke out such high stable clock speeds with our review card, but getting to 2GHz was n’t much of a trouble. ( More on that later in the Performance section, below. )
One “ feature ” that ‘s besides new with Pascal is the introduction of a “ Founders Edition ” translation of the poster, which is replacing the term “ address card ” in the video-card slang. Nvidia ‘s distinctive practice was to create a reference book design of a fresh GPU to send to its card-making partners so that they could use it to build their own interpretation of the cards, typically with fancier coolers than the stock versions and higher clock speeds. not sol anymore, as the translation Nvidia builds, and which will nowadays sell directly to consumers for the biography of the product, is a premium edition, not a sample baseline model. The catch is that the Founders Edition of the GeForce GTX 1080 costs $ 100 more than the “ standard ” translation, which will sell for $ 599. That means the Founders Edition, which we tested, costs $ 699 .
We ‘re not certain how the GeForce GTX 1080-based cards from partners such as EVGA, Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI will differ from the GTX 1080 Founders Edition. We had n’t seen any of them as of urge meter. But Nvidia took pains during the course of its product announcement to let everyone know it had spent considerable engineering resources designing its GPU. not only is it highly overclockable, the company told us, but it runs cool and quieten, and it has premium components throughout, including vapor-chamber cool and even a backplate, which is rare among Nvidia-designed cards .
The GTX 1080 besides features a blower-style design that exhausts heat out of the human body, which is favored by Nvidia in its stock-card GPU designs. Most, if not all, of Nvidia ‘s partners typically offer card designs with coolers that exhaust heat inside the case as opposed to expelling it from the buttocks edge. So there is a benefit to Nvidia ‘s cetacean blueprint, specially for those using it in a cramp or small-form-factor chassis. The electric fan blueprint is besides useful when you ‘ve got several cards installed in an SLI placement, as one poster does n’t transfer the bulge of its heat to the adjacent wag by blowing hot atmosphere straight on it .
The New Shape of SLI
Speaking of SLI, Nvidia is besides introducing a raw connection with the GeForce GTX 1080 that doubles the bandwidth available, compared to the former SLI solution. It ‘s named the “ SLI HB Bridge, ” the “ HB ” being for “ High Bandwidth, ” and uses a two-lane shape, as opposed to the single lane used by the previous connection .
The downside to this access is that the GeForce GTX 1080 supports only two cards in SLI, as it uses both connectors on the poster. In the past, the foremost connection was used to go to the first copulate of cards, and the second connection was used to go to another batting order in the chain. You could keep going all the way down the chain with up to four GPUs. Nvidia states that three and four-way SLI is theoretically hush potential using DirectX 12 features if developers include them, but it ‘s “ not recommended. ”
besides, triple and quad SLI are no longer possible with cards straight out of the box. Nvidia says it will be setting up a site by the time of the May 27 establish of the GTX 1080 to allow dedicate SLI hounds to “ unlock ” the tripartite and four-way SLI feature of speech of the GTX 1080 card. It will involve running an app to identify your card and gun trigger a request for a software “ Enthusiast Key ” from Nvidia, which will allow for SLI beyond two cards .
This variety in SLI policy is n’t that big of a deal, truly, as we imagine the act of people running four top-end video cards could about fit inside our company ‘s lunchroom. Besides, scaling drops well beyond two cards in SLI, and you besides run into the return of the performance being bottle-necked by the CPU .
It ‘s besides possible to run two cards in SLI and use a third just for PhysX, which is how Nvidia had PCs configured at the GTX 1080 ‘s press consequence .
Specs and Design
Let ‘s take a look at the batting order itself first, then we ‘ll get into some new technologies that Nvidia announced at the lapp time as the GeForce GTX 1080. Some of them are exclusive to this new GPU .
Like all former high-end GeForce cards designed by Nvidia, the GeForce GTX 1080 is a dual-slot card. ( A few third-party “ animal ” GTX 980 Ti cards, among them the blistering Zotac GeForce GTX 980 Ti Amp Extreme, take up three slots. ) The GTX 1080 is 10.5 inches in duration, and is precisely the same acme, width, and distance as the GeForce GTX 980 ( and in the lapp approximate range as other high-end Nvidia GPUs ). So nothing is new in the physical-layout department. Nvidia is supposed to be switching from GDDR memory to Generation 2 of its High Bandwidth Memory ( HBM ) following year, possibly with an ostensible consumer version of its “ big Pascal ” tease, which will allow the memory to move from next to the GPU to immediately on the die. This will free up a lot of outer space on the PCB, and allow for the GPUs to be a set shorter, like we saw with AMD ‘s Radeon R9 Fury. But for now, it ‘s business as common .
The biggest change we can see in the GeForce GTX 1080 compared to all the anterior generations is the lone eight-pin PCI Express world power connection. That is a surprise, unheard of on a late-model flagship video wag. Every late GPU we ‘ve reviewed from Nvidia, aside from mainstream and entry-level ones, has required two PCIe connectors. So the fact that this is a flagship GPU reportedly “ faster than a Titan x ” and with just one exponent connection shows you the gains in efficiency the act to 16nm FinFET has produced ( along with a little technology by Nvidia, of course ) .
Out back, the circuit board sports five outputs, including three DisplayPort connectors that are certified for DisplayPort 1.2 but “ quick ” for the 1.3 and 1.4 upgrades, according to Nvidia. Though DisplayPort 1.2 is sufficient to run a 4K ( 3,840 ten 2,160 ) monitor at 60Hz, DisplayPort 1.3 ups the bandwidth on the channel enough to support a 4K monitor at 120Hz, and translation 1.4 ups it even more, to handle nascent 8K at 60Hz .
Out of the corner, the GeForce GTX 1080 ‘s clock amphetamine is an incredibly high gear 1,600MHz, with a boost clock of 1,733MHz. This is approximately 700MHz higher than what we ‘re used to seeing on a high-end Nvidia GPU, so it ‘s a massive jump, and that does n’t even include overclocking numbers .
The circuit board is designed to run aplomb and quieten excessively, just like the former generation. It sports 8GB of super-fast Micron-made GDDR5X memory, which is a first gear in the GPU global. The amazingly low TDP of 180 watt is 70 watts below the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, GeForce GTX Titan X, and previous flagship GPUs .
New Technologies
Let ‘s take a brief look, in turn, at some of the modern technologies that the GTX 1080 is bringing along with it .
Ansel
Ansel is designed to allow for more creative control when taking in-game screenshots, which if, you ‘re like us, credibly was n’t something you considered needed better, or think much about. But it ‘s a thing .
Dedicated gamers have been taking identical creative screenshots for a while immediately, but they are, of course, limited by where the camera can go, and the resoluteness of the images. Ansel solves both of these problems by allowing for a free-ranging camera in any game that supports it, and by letting you capture massive high-res screenshots .
In a demonstration Nvidia run for the press before the launch of the GTX 1080, it captured a scene at 20x solution, and the resulting file was 3GB in size and 46,000 pixels across, or “ 46K ” to use the popular terminology. The Ansel software, named after famed photographer Ansel Adams, besides lets you apply filters to your photos, in semi-Instagram fashion. You can besides rotate the horizon and make other changes .
Ansel will be a feature on games that decide to include it in their feature set, so it wo n’t be something that is available in every game by default option. You activate it with a winder combination, which pauses the game and causes an overlay to appear that allows you to move the television camera, make adjustments, and ultimately capture the skeleton. Nvidia says this feature is supported on Pascal and Maxwell cards .
Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP)
People who use three monitors, or who are into virtual reality ( VR ), will be excited about this engineering, as it could mark a big leap forward for both of these custom cases. What SMP does is allow the GPU to project into 16 “ viewports ” simultaneously and in stereophonic. What this means for the VR earth is a massive increase in rendering focal ratio, as the previous generation of cards had to render each center in sequence .
The GTX 1080 can do both displays in one pass, however, which is why you heard things from Nvidia about how it ‘s “ twice vitamin a fast as a Titan adam … ” and then off to the side of the PowerPoint presentation it said “ … in VR. ” It will besides let you game on several monitors at once, and if you run three monitors with the side monitors angled towards you, it ‘s able to reduce the distortion that occurs on objects and more accurately project one double across all three monitors. You can watch the demonstration here …
… and as it states, the original expulsion is discipline if all three monitors are side-by-side. It ‘s when you pull the side ones toward you that things get askew. SMP fixes this publish, and it looks capital besides .
Fast Sync
We all know what familiar old V-Sync is : It syncs the frame-rate output of the GPU with the freshen pace of the proctor ( typically 60Hz or 60 frames per second ) or an even divisor of it. This produces gaming that is free from tearing, but it locks the peak human body rate at 60fps, which is not ideal for a lot of e-sports competitors ( apparently, we ‘re not them ) .
The solution, then, is to turn off V-Sync, which lets the GPU run at broad amphetamine. But when you are running a actually high frame rate, you can experience latency, which is besides bad for e-sports. To fix both of these problems, Nvidia has developed a raw synchronize mode named “ Fast Sync, ” and it ‘s only advisable to use it in scenarios with extremely high frame rates .
About Our Tests
Things are a spot in flux these days when it comes to testing GPUs, as there are two emerging technologies that this poster was built for that are difficult to test. The foremost is DirectX 12 ( DX12 ), which is just immediately coming on the scene. There are very few real-world benchmarks for it. still, DX12 will probably be the standard graphics API in the future, and this tease was designed to last for a few years, if not longer. So it is important to know if a card can handle DX12 well before buy .
We tested the GTX 1080 with all the newest DX12-capable games we had on bridge player, including Hitman ( the 2016 edition ), Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Ashes of the Singularity. We tested a load of games using DirectX 11, besides, because that API will still be in wide use for at least another year, and probably much longer .
The second engineering that ‘s unmanageable to test at deliver is virtual world, or VR for short. The GeForce GTX 1080 was built to run VR twice adenine fast as its harbinger, and in all the launch presentation documents Nvidia specifically referred to the batting order ‘s VR operation, as that was what the company wanted to highlight. however, there are two major competing VR technologies, in the shape of the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, with more coming to market soon, and it ‘s difficult to establish a alone test that is applicable to all scenarios .
steam has its own VR benchmark, but at the fourth dimension of this writing, it did n’t output a score. rather, it just indicated whether or not your personal computer was ready to handle games using an HTC Vive. Since the baseline recommendation for both the Vive and Oculus is a Core i5 processor and a GTX 970 graphics card, the GTX 1080 and the Core i7 CPU in our quiz bed would well pass this test .
Futuremark is besides working on an approaching VRMark test, but it was merely in beta when we wrote this, and it refused to run on our examination bed, even after making certain the benchmark was up to date. We ‘ll have to wait for future, finalize VR benchmark. But if you ‘re considering buying a GTX 1080 primarily for VR, you can rest assured that stream VR-ready games and those launching in the approach future will run on this menu just fine. It well exceeds the minimal recommendations .
3DMark (Fire Strike)
We started off our testing with Futuremark ‘s 2013 version of 3DMark, specifically the suite ‘s Fire rap subtest. Fire strike is a synthetic test designed to measure overall gambling performance, and Futuremark has expanded Fire Strike nowadays into three subtests. In the past, we used the basic test ( known plainly as “ Fire Strike ” ), deoxyadenosine monophosphate well as the more demand Fire Strike Extreme test. But these GPUs are so mighty that we had to move up to the most punish test, Fire Strike Ultra, which is geared toward simulating the stresses of gaming at 4K .
As the chart shows, the GeForce GTX 1080 dominated right out of the gate, besting every card that stepped up to it, including the former champion, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti. It ‘s quite remarkable when you consider that compared to the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, the GeForce GTX 1080 is using 70 watt less exponent, has fewer CUDA cores, and uses a narrower memory bus ( though faster GDDR5X memory ). This just goes to show the benefits that moving to a smaller process, refining the computer architecture, and enabling harebrained clock speeds can provide .
Tomb Raider (2013)
here, we fired up the 2013 boot of the authoritative deed Tomb Raider, testing at Ultimate detail and three resolutions .
In our beginning “ real world ” trial, we can see the GTX 1080 is going to be a force to be reckoned with, as it was more than 60 percentage faster than the GeForce GTX 980 GPU that it replaces, which is an incredible leap in performance from one generation to the following .
In the by, we normally saw jumps in the vicinity of 20 to 25 percentage from, say, a GeForce GTX 680 to a GeForce GTX 780, so this is one heck of an increase. We besides see in our tests at 3,840×2,160 that the GeForce GTX 1080 will likely be the beginning single GPU adequate to of hitting 60 frames per irregular at 4K, which was not possible at all with the former generation of GPUs .
Sleeping Dogs
adjacent, we rolled out the very demanding real-world bet on benchmark test built into the entitle Sleeping Dogs …
In Sleeping Dogs, we once again see the GeForce GTX 1080 eminent over the competition, improving on the performance laid down by the GTX 980 by 60 percentage once again. It was a shred slower than the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X in this examination at 4K, however, but by only 2fps, which is close adequate to call it basically a affiliation. The Radeon R9 Fury X has always been a beast at senior high school resolutions due to its ultra-fast HBM memory, but the GTX 1080 approximately matches it at 4K here and, at lower resolutions, the R9 Fury X and other cards in this group are just no menace .
Bioshock Infinite
The popular deed Bioshock Infinite is n’t excessively demanding, as late games go, but it ‘s a popular matchless with leading good looks. In its built-in benchmark platform, we set the graphics grade to the highest preset ( Ultra+DDOF ) …
This was a hard-fought battle, as the results in this test were closer than other tests, most probable due to the relatively undemanding nature of this plot. not surprisingly, the GeForce GTX 1080 still came out on top, and at 1440p performed around 50 percentage faster than its harbinger, which is quite impressive. It was merely 10fps quicker at 4K than the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, but that ‘s still a 20 percentage advantage. The GTX 1080 was besides able to hit 69fps at 4K in this benchmark, allowing for silky-smooth super-high-resolution gambling .
Hitman: Absolution
following up was Hitman : absolution, which is an aging plot but distillery pretty hard on a video poster .
By now, it ‘s no storm that the GeForce GTX 1080 topped the charts. The only question is by how much ? The quiz that blew our minds this time around is the 1440p play, where the GTX 1080 ran more than 80 percentage faster than the GeForce GTX 980. This is the kind of performance jump we have n’t seen in several years, surely not from a single generation to the future .
Far Cry Primal (Ultra)
Ubisoft ‘s latest open-world first-person hunt game is one of the most demand titles we use, thanks to its lush foliation, detailed shadows, and otherwise incredible environments .
This examination very clearly illustrates the benefits of upgrading from a GeForce GTX 980 to a GTX 1080, as we see that 4K gambling was not truly playable at crown settings on the GeForce GTX 980 at 25fps, but is much more satisfactory ( at 41fps ) with the GTX 1080. That ‘s a bad improvement, and one that can justify an upgrade, as opposed to gaining “ just ” a 20 percentage or so improvement in certain titles .
Like the former titles, we saw the GTX 1080 post top scores across the circuit board, and while its performance of 41fps at 4K is a lot better than 25fps, as we previously noted, this falls short of the 60fps required for gameplay that ‘s silky-smooth. possibly an eventual GeForce GTX 1080 Ti will be able to handle it .
Ashes of the Singularity
Oxide ‘s Ashes of the Singularity is a bite of a deviation as a benchmark, as it ‘s a real-time scheme title, preferably than a first-person gunman or a third-person action title. Due to the planet-scale nature of its battle scenes, with hundreds of onscreen tanks, ships, and other implements of future war, it can be highly demanding at eminent settings. And because of the overplus of hand over units, this game is besides more CPU-bound—especially at high settings and resolutions—than most other holocene games .
ascribable to the CPU-heavy nature of this style, the scores here are much closer than they were anywhere else in our test. placid, the GTX 1080 distillery dominates here, edging out the previous-generation GTX 980 Ti. At 4K resolutions, the new card looks its best, adding several frames per second over what any other card offered up .
Grand Theft Auto V
As one of the most democratic bet on franchises on the planet, Grand Theft Auto in truth needs no introduction. The fifth episode took a distribute longer than many expected to land on the personal computer. But when it finally did in early 2015, it brought with it a act of graphic improvements and tweakable ocular settings that pushed the plot far beyond its console table roots .
once again, the GTX 1080 dominated hera, well besting the competition from AMD and Nvidia at all resolutions. Most impressively, it tacked on a full 15fps over the Radeon R9 Fury X and GTX 980 Ti at the highest resolution ( 4K ) .
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Lara Croft rises once again in the early 2016 iteration of Square Enix ‘s long-running legal action franchise. As our bomber works to unfold an ancient mystery ( and reveal the confidential to immortality ) ahead of the ancient and deadly Order of Trinity, she traipses through a skid of complex atmospheric environments, from arid tombs to the cold siberian wilderness. A dynamic weather system, and the complexities of Lara ‘s wind-tousled hair, add to the game ‘s ocular complexity .
The performance swerve continued here, with the GTX 1080 particularly mopping the floor with AMD ‘s current high-end R9 Fury X. But even compared to the GTX 980 Ti, the GTX 1080 added about 10fps at the highest resolution, making for polish game play on today ‘s high-end monitors .
Hitman ( 2016, Under DX11 ) The newest bet on in the Hitman series finds Agent 47 turn over a fresh leaf, and embarking on a journey of self-discovery as a teacher at a school for underprivileged children. Just kid ; he kills a crowd of people in this one, equitable like the rest. It does volunteer gorgeous graphics in both DX11 and DX12 varieties, though. We ‘ll tackle the former foremost .
The AMD R9 Fury X managed to best the GTX 1080 for the beginning clock time here, at all resolving power settings. As this is the first time we ‘ve actually used this benchmark, we ‘re wholly not indisputable why. But AMD ‘s High-Bandwidth memory might have something to do with it. regardless, at 4K, the GTX 1080 is close adequate to about call it a tie. And Nvidia ‘s flagship well bests its previous-generation cards on this quiz .
It ‘s hood to get any real common sense of DirectX 12 performance at this point. When we wrote this in mid-may 2016, only a few titles were available with DirectX 12 support. And running these games, anecdotally we saw no graphic differences between the titles running at DX11 versus DX12 settings. In some instances, titles running under DX12 offered performance gains, but elsewhere we saw lesser performance. besides, under DX12, the 2016 Hitman championship locked up more than once in our examination. And we saw a few instances in Rise of the Tomb Raider in which big chunks of the world failed to render at all. We noted missing trees and chunks of wall more than once in testing .
In early words, you should take the downstairs results with a Gibraltar-size hunk of salt. DirectX 12 is still in its highly early stages, and those developers who have implemented it have so far to throw on the spackle and smooth over the cracks. We ‘ll have to wait at least a few more months to say for certain how much of an advantage DX12 offers, and whether it sways things in party favor of AMD or Nvidia in any substantive way. hush, because this is a up-to-date batting order and DX12 is up-to-date technical school, it ‘s worth taking a look at what the GTX 1080 and its competition can do with Microsoft ‘s latest gambling API today .
Rise of the Tomb Raider (Under DX12)
This sequel to 2013 ‘s Tomb Raider is one of the foremost AAA titles to offer DirectX 12 support. We used the preset labeled very high for testing .
It ‘s celebrated that the merely GPU that could run this plot at 4K with a playable frame of reference rate and some disk overhead was the GTX 1080. The GTX 980 Ti was playable at that place arsenic well, but only merely. This bet on just crushed the other GPUs at super high-res. The GTX 1080 besides posted an amaze 84fps at 1440p, which is about double what the GTX 980 was capable of, and four times what the Radeon R9 Fury X turned in at the lapp mount here .
Hitman (2016, Under DX12)
The newest Hitman championship besides offers up a DX12 artwork choice in its benchmark which, like Rise of the Tomb Raider, looked identical to our eyes to the DX11 version. Or at least it did when it was n’t locking up, which never happened under DX11 .
Though the GTX 1080 topped the charts once again ( no surprise there ), it did thus by the smallest margins we ‘ve seen so far, and the AMD R9 Fury X, which was stomped in our previous DX12 test, was extremely competitive here .
Ashes of the Singularity (Under DX12)
The scheme title Ashes of the Singularity was among the first to offer DirectX 12 support, flush when it was even in beta. possibly unsurprisingly, then, it was besides the most static DX12 test we ran, never once crashing, locking up, or perceptibly glitching when we ran it multiple times on a handful of high-end cards .
here again, the GTX 1080 was the leader, but again the AMD R9 Fury X was n’t army for the liberation of rwanda off. At least most of the cards here posted solid gains in frame rates over the DX11 version of the screen. DX12 performance is distillery rather unsettled turf, and it remains to be seen what type of gains we ‘ll see when several developers implement a wide aspect of features, and which cards will respond best to the new API .
Overclocking
We did n’t have angstrom a lot prison term as we ‘d like to test overclocking. But using a beta version of EVGA ‘s Precision X utility, we were able to push our revue wag ‘s clock speed up good above 2GHz, which is a doorsill unheard of until this card, and a healthy 300MHz or sol above the 1,733MHz top Boost Clock rush of the batting order .
That translated to a 3fps dislodge in FarCry Primal at the Ultra set and 4K resolution, and a 4fps rise to Hitman under DirectX 11 at 4K and high settings. possibly with more clock, we could have eked out a higher stable overclcock, but considering the card comes clock much, much higher out of the corner than any former menu, the fact that it could be pushed even higher is impressive. And of naturally, overclockability much varies from card to card, so your pixel rise may vary .
It ‘s besides deserving pointing out that it was lone when overclocking, with the side popped off of our test bench, that we in truth noticed any sports fan make noise on the GTX 1080 at all. Running at breed speeds, the batting order was signally quiet, even under load. The fan was spinning, of path, so it was n’t wholly silent. But the card was n’t perceptibly noisier than the 120mm fan on our Noctua CPU cool, which is impressive for any high-end calling card. Considering the GTX 1080 is far and away the most knock-down single-chip menu we ‘ve tested ( and it ‘s not liquid cooled like the AMD R9 Fury X ), its silent operation is doubly impressive .
The Fastest Graphics Card
A bunch of times when writing conclusions to reviews of television cards like this, we have to resort to qualifiers such as “ It ‘s a great tease if … ” or “ It ‘s actually fast, but you might want to wait … ” or even “ It ‘s the best card at this price, but there ‘s a circuit board that is less expensive that is about angstrom good. ” That is not the font this time around .
The GeForce GTX 1080 is decidedly the fastest single GPU in being at this time, and by a wide margin, besides. not alone does it offer ampere much as 80 percentage more performance than a GeForce GTX 980, but it besides spanks the GeForce GTX 980 Ti by about 20 to 30 percentage, and offers raw engineering that neither circuit board supports. We ‘re talking, of course, about the Simultaneous Multi Projection, newfangled VR capabilities, and high-bandwidth SLI, to name a few. If you ‘re looking for the fastest GPU available, there is no question whatsoever it ‘s the GTX 1080, as it besides pummeled AMD ‘s $ 650 Radeon R9 Fury X in about every benchmark we ran .
In fact, it seems like the lone approaching GPU that might suppress sales of the GeForce GTX 1080 is the also-announced GeForce GTX 1070, which is a GPU we know very little about at this time. We know it ‘s going on sale on June 10, and that it will offer less operation than the GTX 1080 at a price of $ 379. ( A Founders Edition version will be $ 449. ) That ‘s a much more compelling price point for the huge majority of gamers out there. It remains to be seen what kind of performance the GTX 1070 will offer, but we ‘re certain a bunch of gamers are holding off on pulling the trigger until that launch occurs .
a far as AMD goes, it ‘s all silent on the western Front, as they say. We know the ship’s company is planning on unveiling some details about its approaching Polaris architecture at Computex 2016, but those GPUs will reportedly be targeted at mobile and “ mainstream, ” so it ‘s doubtful any of them near-term will be able to lay a baseball glove on the high-end Pascal GTX 1080 or GTX 1070. AMD has spoken of an approaching “ enthusiast ” GPU, code-named “ Vega, ” but it ‘s rumored to be arriving later this year, giving Nvidia free reign to dominate the upper echelon of the gambling market for the summer of 2016, if not longer. Since AMD has besides moved to a a lot smaller 14nm FinFET process for Polaris and Vega, hopes are senior high school that the company can challenge Nvidia equitable adenine competently as it did with its Fiji and Hawaii GPUs. But only time will tell. The longer the lead AMD lets Nvidia have with its impressive modern high-end card, the more market partake it will probably lose, at least to comfortable enthusiasts .
The only other consideration at this item in time is the fact that there ‘s still the looming menace of a GPU based on “ big pascal, ” which would be the life-size die of this architecture. You might not have realized it, but the GTX 1080 is actually a cut-down version of the life-size chip, which is the average for Nvidia launches. The company has previously launched a smaller interpretation of its die first, then later on out a more mighty life-size chip, which has been in the past the GTX Titan discrepancy. In this case it might be named the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti or possibly GeForce GTX 1180. But again, there ‘s no impressive when ( or if ) that card will arrive in a shape aimed at gamers .
Our only real reservation with the GeForce GTX 1080 is the $ 100 “ Founders Edition ” price bounty that Nvidia is charging with this interpretation of the card. It ‘s hefty, on a card that ‘s already expensive, and it ‘s unclear when cards will arrive at the predict $ 599 MSRP. We would urge the economical and patient among you to wait and see. But with high-end cards like this, there ‘s frequently limited breed and pent-up necessitate ( even when there is n’t closely this much of a performance boost ), which drives up prices. That, combined with the fact that AMD does n’t seem quick to launch a rival to the GTX 1080 anytime soon, means it may be months before we see non-Founders Edition versions of GeForce GTX 1080 cards selling at $ 599. Board partners like EVGA and Asus will surely have no reason to drop the prices that low if demand remains high .
so, if you want a high-end card for 4K gambling and VR future-proofing, and can afford the goodly outgo, there ‘s little reason not to plunk your accredit circuit board down. No other single card is likely to come stopping point to the GTX 1080 soon, and we do n’t expect prices to drop much cursorily. The GTX 1070 will about decidedly be a better value for bombastic numbers of shoppers. But, then again, gamers playing in the high-end video-card market, who want the absolute highest frame rates possible, never seemed to care a solid fortune about that. We do n’t expect them, with all that the GTX 1080 brings, to start now .
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 (Founders Edition)
4.5
Editors ‘ choice
See It
$ 549.00
at NVIDIA
MSRP $ 699.00
Pros
Cons
The Bottom Line
The GTX 1080 is army for the liberation of rwanda and away the fastest single GPU we have always tested, and is the first GPU that allows for true 60fps 4K bet on ( and improved VR, besides ). It ‘s a game-changing GPU in every smell .
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