Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti 8GB Review: Vega In The Crosshairs

[Wisecracker]

I wonder if the boost variance is dependent upon which SMx is disabled?

Message received by AMD __ Sapphire dropped Vega 64/56 prices to $500/$400.

 

[paul prochnow]

I am surprised how ridiculously long it is....I was looking for a 2nd GPU - LOL! ....Now with this new stacking DDR6 RAM etc. what is up with a design like this ???? Seem anachronistic to me.

 

[paul prochnow]

There is no drama in those clock speeds R E A L L Y ! ! ! I was thinking THIS HOLIDAY SEASON would send me a PRESENT of the REAL CORE CLOCK of 2.o0o0 GHz----really....they C O U L D do it. I think they a bunch of rich gamers they keep in labs or greasy basements changing our their VGA card every 3 mos. to get a F A S T E R card...and SPEED is all that gaming respects. Gamers will run a lowered resolution to get the last FPS and MHz out of their rig.

 

[0InVader0]

The MSI 1070 Gaming X is 5 eur cheaper than the 1080 where I live (around 520 eur). I don't see this card being anywhere near the price I want either.

Tbh, the fact that there's still no word of the Samsung 144hz G-sync Qdot monitors makes the AMD Vega cards really appealing. + Freesync is cheaper too. If only they didn't consume almost twice as much power as the NVidia equivalents. I have 3 HDD, and SSD and I'm planning on adding another SSD. My PSU can't take much more.

With Volta being just around the corner, it's a shitty time to buy a gfx card. Fcking miners, smh.

 

[0InVader0]

Oh and another thing to factor in with the purchase is win7 support ending in 2020. If the next windows won't be any good, I'll be seriously considering switching to Linux Mint for good. NVidia has pretty good drivers on linux. Haven't heard anything good about the AMD linux drivers though.

 

[CaptainTom]

"the GeForce enjoys big advantages in power, noise, and overclockability."

Last time I checked the 1070 Ti can't be bios flashed to a Vega 64 and then undervolted to near 1080 Ti performance. Nope, it's just a hamstrung 1080 (And the 1080 already can barely stay above the 56).

At $379 (Accompanied with $100 price cuts to the 1070 and 1080) this card would have been a great deal. But otherwise this is just a pathetic attempt to grab headlines while Vega/Polaris cards continue to rapidly age better than their competition.

 

[CaptainTom]

Oh and another thing to factor in with the purchase is win7 support ending in 2020. If the next windows won't be any good, I'll be seriously considering switching to Linux Mint for good. NVidia has pretty good drivers on linux. Haven't heard anything good about the AMD linux drivers though.

Look bub, nobody wants a viable alternative to Windows more than me - but get a f***ing clue.

Do you like compiling BS every time you download something? Do you like using shoddy office programs (Even OSX doesn't have this issue)? Do you like not being able to play most AAA games?

^If the answer is "yes", then yeah - Linux is perfect for you.

Again I WANT an alternative to Windows. I was really rooting for SteamOS, but man Valve dropped the ball the SECOND Microsoft stopped forcing "Games for Windows" on devs. Thus proving SteamOS was just a threat - Valve never intended to follow through.

Hopefully something changes....for the better...

 

[dalauder]

Thanks for the great review.

It's unfortunate that graphics manufacturers don't have anything to offer the midrange (~$200) market. I saw RX 470's for $100 two years ago. Anything comparable is $230 nowadays.

 

[Nintendork]

Vega56 is still cheaper and it's still the better value overall for newer games that are basically AMD optimized.

 

[Pixel13]

@ Vancliff. The title of the review is: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti 8GB Review: Vega In The Crosshairs

That's at the top of each page.

 

[10tacle]

Vega56 is still cheaper and it's still the better value overall for newer games that are basically AMD optimized.

And what games would those be?

Battlefield 1 - nope
Sniper Elite 4 - nope
Ashes Of Singularity - nope
Metro: Last Light Redux - nope
Middle-earth: Shadow of War - nope
Rise of the Tomb Raider - nope
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands - nope
Tom Clancy’s The Division - nope
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III - nope
The Witcher 3 - nope
Hitman 2016 - nope
Resident Evil 7 - nope
Doom (Vulkan) - nope
Prey - nope
GTA V - nope
Formula 1 2017 - nope
Project Cars/Project Cars 2 - nope
Assetto Corsa - nope
DiRT Rally/DiRT 4 - nope
Euro Truck Simulator 2/American Truck Simulator - nope

Now what games do the RX 56 beat the 1070 Ti by a few FPS meaning slightly better optimized for AMD? Destiny 2 and Dues Ex. That's it.

Regarding value, sellers are overpricing the 1070 Ti's right now. But between both cards, prices fluctuate wildly depending on where you shop. In the US for example, Amazon has an XFX RX 56 variant for $565, but a Sapphire one for $499. They have a GTX 1070 Ti EVGA FTW2 model for $499, an MSI 1070 Ti for $529, and an ASUS ROG Strix Gaming 1070 Ti for $550. NewEgg is selling that same XFX model RX 56 (model #VEGMLBFX6) for $419 and ASUS ROG Strix Gaming model 1070 TI for $495. You can get an ASUS ROG Strix gaming GTX 1080 for $529 on Amazon whereas they are charging $600 for an XFX RX 64.

Finally, the only Vegas I've seen, either 56 or 64, only have the lame blower reference cooler design meaning little overclock headroom (on top of Catalyst drivers not playing nice with Vega overclocking). When you take a 1080 Ti through overclocking paces, it leaves the RX 56 behind and puts it square into reference GTX 1080 performance. So the point is, it boils down to where you find either GPU cheaper. Right now, the 1070 Ti's are overpriced and vendors are price gouging them into GTX 1080 territory - real world 1070 Ti prices are not where they need to be (lower and closer to the $430-$450 mark).

 

[10tacle]

At $379 (Accompanied with $100 price cuts to the 1070 and 1080) this card would have been a great deal. But otherwise this is just a pathetic attempt to grab headlines while Vega/Polaris cards continue to rapidly age better than their competition.

I don't disagree with both points, but I think the AIB card should have been closer to the $430-$450 price point - Nvidia setting an MSRP of reference release price of $379 is too close to the 1070 when you factor in the additional cost of AIB vendor GPUs. And it's a fact that AMD GPUs do have longer life spans than Nvidia when it comes to keeping a GPU for years. The R9 290 vs. the GTX 780 is proof of that.

With that said, I know of no serious gaming enthusiast who keeps his GPU more than two or three years at most before upgrading. I sure never have. My older GPUs either get sold or put out to pasture in backup gaming rigs and PCs of siblings and parents/grandparents.

 

[Rexer]

So how long would anyone say Vega 56 and 1070ti will have market prominence? What's the projection of their longevity being both are top of their class GPUs? I had 3 cards in 4 years and from the start of it, I hoped the first card would've have lasted 3 years.
I'd like a card that's at least relevant for 3 years. I'm paying more for the cards every year -now that we're scaling the price charts with the bit miners. It doesn't make good spending sense if a $600 or $700 card can't fly for 2 years.
I'd love to see a mod kit that upgrades the gpu ram and chokes or even replaces gpu chip on the card. Everything's glued or stapled irreplaceable. Seems like a waste looking in my closet at my 7950, 780, 970, 390x.
I was hoping to get a Vega back in May when I blew up the 390x but I settled for a 580 nitro+. I paid $259 (which was good deal for an 8gb card). Immediately, I mean the next day, the 580 8gb cards disappeared. Any retailer that had them were asking $400+. They dropped about $150 in price last month!
My cousins got a 1080 and gsync 27" paid $850 says he got a deal. Wow. And I just scrounge every penny in the house for a Vega 64 for $500.. . and they say I got lucky to get it at retail price.

 

[10tacle]

So how long would anyone say Vega 56 and 1070ti will have market prominence? What's the projection of their longevity being both are top of their class GPUs?.... It doesn't make good spending sense if a $600 or $700 card can't fly for 2 years..

Well nobody has a crystal ball, especially with what future games currently in development will demand. The two and a half year old $650 (at release) GTX 980Ti (6GB VRAM) is still a strong performer in most games, especially DX11 games (example here with the new game COD: WW2 - http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/call_of_duty_ww2_pc_graphics_analysis_benchmark_review,5.html). However, more DX12 titles are starting to favor newer GPU architecture of Vega and Pascal and the relative similarly comparable RX 56 and GTX 1070 start to pull away from the 980 Ti. But that doesn't mean it won't still be a usable card going into next year as it turns three years old. At release, the 980 Ti was well work spending $650 over the $550 of the GTX 980. You can see that prove itself in the link to the benchmark in COD above where a video card costs 18% more but gets 25-30% more in performance out of it.

I'd love to see a mod kit that upgrades the gpu ram and chokes or even replaces gpu chip on the card.

Wouldn't we all. But I'm pretty sure AIB graphics card partners (EVGA, MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS, etc.) wouldn't find that very cool of AMD and Nvidia selling GPU chips direct to the consumer like a CPU for a motherboard upgrade. That is if the architecture change between GPUs would even work in a previous generation board...and the GPU makers would need to come up with a socket form on chip placement for swapping out instead of soldering everything. They change much more than between generations of Intel chips and motherboards where many times just a BIOS update is all that's required to upgrade a previous generation motherboard with a new generation CPU (like the Intel Z170 chipset made for the 6th generation Skylake work with a 7th generation Kaby Lake).

 

[mapesdhs]

From other benchmarks I've seen, DX12 performance in BF1 is poor. Average FPS is a bit lower than in DX11, and minimum FPS far worse in some cases. If you're looking for BF1 performance info, I'd recommend looking for benchmarks on other sites that test in DX11.

The point of my question was that whatever is causing the minimum spike on Vega64 and the 1080 Ti, it doesn't happen to the Vega56, 1070 Ti or 1080 (I'm assuming here that these tests are run more than once so that outliers can be excluded).

Most of the 1440p results have the 1070/Ti/Vega56 in the 60-90 fps range with high settings. What sort of framerates do you consider appropriate for adaptive sync use?

I guess I'm too used to people on forums banging on about wanting 120 to 144fps. 😀

... Second is about :50 into the video on this page: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-1-directx-12-benchmark,5017.html, where the camera turns. There's more chop on that sequence than anywhere else.

Assuming the runs are consistent, why doesn't it affect the other cards?

As for The Division, I averaged 32.7 FPS in the 1080 Ti review...I believe using the Ultra preset. In our 1070 Ti story, I dialed down to Medium quality and saw 42.7 FPS. Since I knew perf would be marginal on 1070-class hardware at 4K, I sacrificed quality in the name of (hopefully) playable performance.

There are two down sides to this: a) it means one can't compare results across reviews, b) selecting a complexity level so that results end up in a "playable" range might miss situations where certain detail configs can make some types of card fall off a cliff, usually due to VRAM issues. If I may contrast this with that CPU test suite you sent me way back, the tests don't get altered with each new CPU product so that the numbers come out in a "sensible" range; instead, one runs exactly the same tests so the results are comparable, but when the tests themselves begin to age for whatever reason (eg. timed tests completing too fast for the differences to be meaningful), then the whole test suite gets updated with harder tests, which is what you sensibly did. I'd rather these GPU tests were consistent so one could directly compare data between one review and another.

A lot of companies using "overclocked" names actually had overclocked 1070 Tis before Nvidia told them they'd have to standardize on a reference frequency. ...

Boy, I'd love to see those email exchanges. 😀

weekend--I think we're all eager to see if those lower prices last.

Where I am (UK), my normal go-to site for checking this sort of thing only has one model listed, and it's "CALL":

https://www.scan.co.uk/shop/computer-hardware/gpu-amd/amd-radeon-rx-vega-56-graphics-cards

Makes it look more like Vega 56 is EOL. The contrast to listed NVIDIA products couldn't be more profound:

https://www.scan.co.uk/shop/computer-hardware/gpu-nvidia/2250/2505/2672

Personally I'd rather get a 1080 Ti, but prices remain stubbornly high.

Ian.