Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Pascal Review

[JeanLuc]

Anandtech once started including overclocked cards in it’s reviews starting with the GTX460 which Nvidia gave them at the same time as AMD lunched the HD6970 and were torn a new one by readers for doing it. Since then they only compare stock vs stock which is the fairest way IMO as Overclocking can be hit and miss with different cards being capable of overclocking much higher than others.

The only time IMO you should include overclocked cards is when you’re reviewing non reference cards from manufactures which appear a month or two after a product first launches. At release though stock vs stock is the best way to get a comparison, if you can overclock your card then great you have a free bonus and if someone else’s card doesn’t overclock at all then tough luck.

 

[jkhoward]

Honestly, I was expecting more..

 

[F-minus]

Basically. I don't blame em either. You want free cards, then you run tests under our pre determined rules. IF you wanna do your own thing that's cool too, just buy your own cards.

Wanna bet when Polaris launches it's going to be pit against OCed 950s,960s, 970s,980s and 980Tis? Anyway there's couple of reviews actually doing reviews with with an OCed 980Ti and it's pretty much hanging in there with the GTX 1080, so a sidegrade at best.

http://www.computerbase.de/2016-05/geforce-gtx-1080-test/12/#diagramm-gigabyte-gtx-980-ti-gaming-oc-vs-gtx-1080-oc-benchmark-part-2

 

[Kiss_P]

Beast and Best VGA.

 

[technoholic]

other things aside, we now need more expensive CPUs it seems. High end CPUs are necessity especially if optimum SLI performance is aimed

 

[NeatOman]

I was hoping the 1080 would OC better (over on Ars they got a 15% OC) still 30% gain over the Titan X is awesome. The Titian X did 20% on initial reviews, the 980 ti did 25% and im 100% sure people have gotten way past that.

Its really nice to see IPC to wattage did drop in half which is very nice. And i just upgraded my PSU to a PC Power & Cooling Silencer MKIII 850 watt last year BOOOOO!!! lol, could have kept my old 430 watt clean power rated PSU with jap capacitors and run a single 1080 and a i7-6700k with three HDD's and one SSD and still be in a very safe spot to do heavy OC. I ran a FX-8320 @4.5GHz and a HD 7950 @1250MHz for YEEEEEARS on a CX430 PSU, only could get away with that with the first year production of those as they used a B grade part from a Gold 500 watt Seasonic PSU and rebadged i think. The overload protection kicked in when i ran Prime95 64-bit and Furmark at the same time which is far above what you would push it anyway. Did Adia64 CPU, GPU congruently no problem staying around 70c. Sucks for people that invested into 1200 watt PSU's, i wasn't looking for a PSU but i got my 850 watt PSU because it was on sale for $80 from $240.

 

[InvalidError]

other things aside, we now need more expensive CPUs it seems. High end CPUs are necessity especially if optimum SLI performance is aimed

Do you really want something even more expensive than the i7-5930K and i7-5960X?

 

[MyCuleUsrName]

I just sold my HD7990 with the intent to get a 980Ti Hydro GTX, Glad I waited for this review,as I am definitely going to wait and snag a 1080, hopefully on the release date. I would have been disappointed if I would have paid $650+ for the 980 Ti. I switched to AMD right after the days of Nvidia Geforce 6800Ultra, and haven't looked back since. But I don't think AMD has anything to compare (and I am not waiting months for AMD to release something)....even if I cross-fired my HD7990, I couldn't get anywhere near a SLI'd pair of 1080's, and I can now do it with far much less juice. I do agree though, we need a top-end OC'd 980Ti in this review, and also the OC'd 1080. However, that data is available so I will have to hunt it and do my own comparison, but still sure the 1080 is going to come out on top, and at less money.

 

[Dayne_87]

Hmmm, very enticing but I have a 980ti and I'm honestly not sure whether it's worth upgrading or not. I could probably sell the card for $500 and then it's only like $100-$200 extra to upgrade to the 1080, but I'm not sure it's worth it. I will probably wait instead for the 1080ti.

 

[ahnilated]

Honestly, I was expecting more..

Yep, they took out HBM2 and dropped the total amount of RAM. I knew this would be disappointing to a lot of people including myself. I guess I wait for a 1080Ti and see if that makes me want to flip the purchase trigger.

 

[darcotech]

Hi, I am not that impressed.

You should compare GTX 1080 with GTX 980 ! We all know there will be GTX 1080 Ti later.

When you calculate mhz difference and shaders number difference, it doesn't look so outstanding.

GTX 980 has 2048 cores
GTX 1080 has 2560 cores, so 1.25 more

GTX 980 runs on 1127 MHz
GTX 1080 runs on 1607 MHz, so 1.425 times higher

Just this makes it 1.781 times faster (on paper !)

It still has faster memory, can run longer on boost maybe,...so


(Results from other site):
Fallout UHD 1.58 faster
Rise of Tomb raider UDH 1.6258 faster
SW-BF UHD 1.645
The Division UHD 1.608

Average: 1.61 faster on UDH resolutions

So somewhere where hypoteticaly overclocked 980 would be.

So where are new technologies solutions that would speed up graphics?

And they said that they spent billions on this? Not USD for sure, some poor country currency maybe.

So no, not impressed as I was expecting more punch for the same mhz/cores.

Will wait end of the year. My 970 will do till then.Or even go AMD route.

 

[cangelini]

Chris, were you invited to the Nvidia press event in Texas?

About time we saw some cards based of a new process, it seemed like we were going to be stuck on 28nm for the rest of time.

As normal Nvidia is creaming it up in DX11 but DX12 performance does look ominous IMO, there's not enough gain over the previous generation and makes me think AMD new Polaris cards might dominate when it comes to DX12.

Indeed, I was there.

I was surprised that we didn't hear more from AMD prior to this launch. It'll be interesting to see what they come up with in the next few weeks!

 

[ohim]

So many people crying about stock vs stock .... Of course they tested stock cards for now since we don`t have OC versions of 1080 out... just to keep it fair.

To the people saying AMD has an opportunity here, no they don`t, Polaris is meant to bring good value to the mid range class not highend / enthusiast.

Though the TDP and power consumption is sweet for a card that has this power i was expecting lower temps ... seeing 85°C in stress tests ... meh ..

I`m not an Nvidia fan but this card sure is sweet .. with custom coolers temps will get better and maybe more OC but price will sure go up.

 

[cangelini]

Seriously I have to ask, did nvidia instruct every single reviewer to bench the 1080 against stock maxwell cards? Cause i'd like to see real world scenarios with an OCed 980Ti, because nobody runs stock or even buys stock, if you can even buy stock 980Tis.

No, it's fairly standard to test against stock cards wherever possible. It certainly would be great to do an all-out overclocked comparison though. We can make that happen.

 

[cangelini]

performance wise, no comment. Price wise, really? if the 1080 costs 700 @ launch, the 1080ti, or whatever, will cost how much? 1000? then the Pascal Titan 1500? I dont like the road we are heading, really.

If Nvidia is going to charge $700 for the version of the card I prefer, then it's a $700 card. If they wanted it to be a $600 card, they should have set the reference design's price at $600. At the very least, show us what we can expect from partner boards for the less expensive price.
The 1080 costs 600 at launch, that extra 100 is the suckers price that nvidia is charging for day one people. They are charging 100 because they know most are stupid enough to pay it. The actual price is 600

 

[FormatC]

I have a huge list of cards with custom design for me and I will write tons of single reviews in the next months.
But I hope, more of this content will be also translated from German into English.

 

[Shankovich]

Roughly 10-20 fps gains at this price are...expected. There's nothing really outstanding going on here. Thanks for mentioning clearly heavy GameWorks titles like RoT and Project Cars should show larger gains, almost all the other reviews I've read haven't stated that. To me, it looks like nVidia once again screwed up their node transition and offset it by overclocking the hell out of this chip.

 

[tomc100]

Whoever made those power graphs need to redo them since they're worthless. I had to go to another site to look at a power comparison graph.

 

[TechyInAZ]

Sweet performance bump from Maxwell. At least the graphics card arena isn't hampered by measly 10% performance boosts like Intel is.

I'm glad were finally seeing a card that can hit 4k ultra without issues. I can imagine we'd be seeing 65fps at 4k on a 1080P at 2.1ghz instead of stock speeds. Making the need for G sync obsolete for those few cases.

Now that we know the absolute power of the 1080, I'm really excited to see what the GTX 1070 and 1060 ti can offer for so cheap.

 

[Nine-Tails]

Are u sli 1080s?

 

[agentbb007]

Wow this looks awesome, can't wait to see what the aftermarket coolers can do.

 

[Guest]

How terrible that DX12 **** is that Nvidia was forced only to support two way SLI.

 

[Shankovich]

Seriously I have to ask, did nvidia instruct every single reviewer to bench the 1080 against stock maxwell cards? Cause i'd like to see real world scenarios with an OCed 980Ti, because nobody runs stock or even buys stock, if you can even buy stock 980Tis.

No, it's fairly standard to test against stock cards wherever possible. It certainly would be great to do an all-out overclocked comparison though. We can make that happen.

That would be great. Awesome review as always Chris.

 

[3ogdy]

I'm quite disappointed at this: after halving the process node, improving the architecture, adding many improvements along the way, this card comes at a higher TDP than the previous one and performs a bit better. Something's wrong here.

Chris, please do a review with GTX 980, 980 Ti and 1080 with the last one clocked exactly like a 980. I'd really like to see how much of this 15-FPS-avg gain is thanks to that 40%-ish increase in clock speed.
Lower power consumption...well...the 980 stood around the 300W mark in load and the 1080 appears to spend most of its time around the 250W mark. It's probably even better if we negate that clock speed advantage. But what about its performance in that case?

What are the actual architectural gains? Of course a 3.7GHz Pentium 4 is gonna be faster than a 2.6GHz one. We all know that... Combining clock speed improvements with architectural gains masks the actual gains, but I believe a clock-for-clock comparison would be very useful.

 

[Nine-Tails]

I just upgraded to a 4k tv last week and was just trying to see if u used 1080 sli for 4k benchmarks?