Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Pascal Review

[F-minus]

I've noticed that a lot of people who are disappointed with the 1080 are comparing it to the 980 Ti. It appears to be a 20-30% performance increase over the 980 Ti in most games.

The 1080 is not the 980 Ti replacement though. It is a 980 replacement and when you look at it that way and see the 60-70% improvement (101% in Rise of the Tomb Raider) that is a pretty nice jump from one generation to the next.

Expecting to see those 60-70% jumps over the 980 Ti isn't really realistic in my opinion because this is the 980 replacement. I think you will see the kind numbers you were hoping for when the 1080 Ti rolls out.

I'm personally anxious to see if a single 1070 will be able to match my SLI 970s. There are some games that don't support SLI and some games where VRAM has caused issues for me at 1440p.

With current resale values I could sell my pair of 970s for about $400 and get a 1070 with no out of pocket cost. As long as I won't see a performance decrease from my SLI 970s trading them in for a single 1070 with 8GB of VRAM seems like a no brainer.

That putting salt on the wounds really, it's priced above what the 980Ti was at release so it should be compared in that price segment.

 

[ahnilated]

You guys keep talking about the prices of the 980Ti being $549 ish. Well I purchased mine for a lot more than that and if you look at EVGA's site:

http://www.evga.com/Products/ProductList.aspx?type=0&family=GeForce+900+Series+Family&chipset=GTX+980+Ti

The prices are STILL above that. If you look on Newegg's site the only $549 card is Refurbished.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007709%20600565061&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&Order=PRICE&PageSize=30

 

[eklipz330]

nvidias founder edition is basically giving their most loyal consumers the shaft... and the consumers love it.

no hbm2 means this is lame. incremental update at a similar pricepoint is lame. hopefully AMD brings out the big guns.

 

[rush21hit]

Well, if anything Raja Konduri said is true, then we can expect Polaris to be much better in term of improvements over the last gen. Remember a video when they compare Polaris 11 to a 950 running Hitman? The chip used was supposedly in a very early stage of development an at a mere 880mhz. All while consuming 54 watts while the 950 about 84watts. And Raja said their target are at least 1Ghz.

2016 truly is an exciting years for GPU.

 

[Nine-Tails]

The 980 and 980 ti are 2 diffrent cards people. The 980 ti is a locked versions of the titan x. And u misunderstand whith liquid cooling and aftermarket coolers we wont need to overclock cause those ones will come with a factory overclock(the after market company modifies the clock speed to run faster by default with better cooling.... exp the evga 980 ti hybrid ran at 1190mhz stock and a boost to 1340mhz out of the box) and i will be sli-ing the 1080 for 4k till a single alternative is released.

 

[king3pj]

I've noticed that a lot of people who are disappointed with the 1080 are comparing it to the 980 Ti. It appears to be a 20-30% performance increase over the 980 Ti in most games.

The 1080 is not the 980 Ti replacement though. It is a 980 replacement and when you look at it that way and see the 60-70% improvement (101% in Rise of the Tomb Raider) that is a pretty nice jump from one generation to the next.

Expecting to see those 60-70% jumps over the 980 Ti isn't really realistic in my opinion because this is the 980 replacement. I think you will see the kind numbers you were hoping for when the 1080 Ti rolls out.

I'm personally anxious to see if a single 1070 will be able to match my SLI 970s. There are some games that don't support SLI and some games where VRAM has caused issues for me at 1440p.

With current resale values I could sell my pair of 970s for about $400 and get a 1070 with no out of pocket cost. As long as I won't see a performance decrease from my SLI 970s trading them in for a single 1070 with 8GB of VRAM seems like a no brainer.

That putting salt on the wounds really, it's priced above what the 980Ti was at release so it should be compared in that price segment.

Is it? I'd thought the 980 Ti was $650 at release. At $600 the 1080 is $50 more than the $550 the 980 launched at but it's also $50 less than a 980 Ti.

Hopefully AMD's new Polaris lineup will end up being a great value and force Nvidia to lower their prices to bring them back in line with the 900 series.

 

[none12345]

Im rather underwhelmed by the 1080. Sure its the fastest thing you could buy at the moment( or in 2 weeks when you can buy it).. BUT, and this is a big but....

Its about 30% faster then a 980ti, but about 15% more expensive. So really you are only talking about 15% better performance/price ratio. For a move from 28nm to 16nm after being stuck on 28nm for 4 years.....that's seriously underwhelming.

I expected more from the node shrink we've been waiting 4 years for.

Not that i will buy a 4k screen for a year or 2, but, i expcted to at least see todays games run 60 fps in 4k on the 1080, and it just doesnt do it. It manages it in 1 game, the same game that previous gen gpus do it in, whoopee doo. Not that you need 60 fps to be playable, but thats what i expected, because the next games will demand even more.

Oh well, there is still the hope that polaris will be more what i expect out of a 4 year delay in node shrinks.

 

[wh3resmycar]

i like how these "experts" here keep shouting foul on a stock vs stock comparison. because screw it with keeping the test "scientific" right? you need to keep those variables to a minimum as much as possible to make a test more valid.

 

[ammaross]

50-70% improvement by upping CUDA cores from 2048 to 2650 (29% extra CUDA cores), and basically OCing from 1126Mhz to 1607Mhz (42% boost) and a 42% OC on RAM (7GHz to 10GHz) works out perfectly to just a beefier (and overclocked) Maxwell (afforded by the die shrink). When games are written to take advantage of the API improvements for Ansel and SMP (hopefully won't be as rare as HairWorks and the like) then we should see some better benefits.

Here's hoping AMD made significant strides and didn't just port their Islands cores to FinFET like nVidia did.

 

[hasten]

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.

I think this is a bit of a misconception. AMD is seeing large gains in DX12 because of the very bad performance in DX11 and they have focused on that API. Nvidia has had optimized DX11 drivers so we aren't seeing the same type of gains. AMD does have better capabilities with mature async compute, but the developers still need to utilize it.

I admit I lean green, but the reviews I have seen of the 1080 are very impressive. I've also been pleasantly surprised by AMD's gains in DX12. I'll have to wait for Polaris before I move on from my 980ti, although I'd have to see some pretty nice numbers from AMD as well as not sit in a waiting game forever if they run into production issues with the die shrink.

 

[hasten]

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.

Same pricing structure as last generation. 980 was $599 at launch. 1080ti will be launched after AMD presents competition and they will drop the price of the 1080 and sell the ti at ~$700. Nothing has changed, no need to panic. They just are doing a money grab on the early adapters... if you want to play on the bleeding edge you pay for it.

 

[vpoko]

Fail gen for nvidia.

They need 1.7Ghz to actually show improvement vs the 1-1.2Ghz of the previous AMD/Nvidia gpu's. Imagine the GP104 at 1.2Ghz.

Wheres the efficiency?

Polaris 10 is aiming at the same 1Ghz sweet spot, improving the hell out of it's gpu cores.

It really doesn't matter how you get performance, some designs have higher complexity giving them more instructions per cycle while others are simpler, have a lower IPC, but can clock higher. Might AMD get better even performance? Sure, who knows, but it definitely won't be with Polaris at the high end, since they're not targeting this segment with Polaris. Maybe Vega.

 

[hasten]

Fail gen for nvidia.

They need 1.7Ghz to actually show improvement vs the 1-1.2Ghz of the previous AMD/Nvidia gpu's. Imagine the GP104 at 1.2Ghz.

Wheres the efficiency?

Polaris 10 is aiming at the same 1Ghz sweet spot, improving the hell out of it's gpu cores.

It really doesn't matter how you get performance, some designs have higher complexity giving them more instructions per cycle while others are simpler, have a lower IPC, but can clock higher. Might AMD get better even performance? Sure, who knows, but it definitely won't be with Polaris at the high end, since they're not targeting this segment with Polaris. Maybe Vega.

My mistake. From what the chatter has been I assumed it was Polaris that was going to be the next competitive card. From a quick look, AMD is hoping for a October launch for Vega. That late could be a death knell if the 1070 comes in with the same level of gains as the 1080 and at a reasonable price (it's possible we'll see Fury X speeds for $350-400).

 

[TechyInAZ]

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.

Then in 2 way SLI = 3.562 times faster!

 

[Marcelo Viana]

this card is all about overclock, that by the way comes from 16nm node and finfet, nothing really from pascal arch.
This chip is disapoint, 6 frames over a 28nm at 1ghz been 16nm at 1,7ghz in DX12?
This card should not bench on DX11 anymore it's brend new arch(or should) in 2016 already.
Sorry but waiting for polaris or even vega.

 

[newood]

I was wonder the Folding@home PPD of this new card?

 

[Gunsmithy]

Typo in the comparison chart with the 980! Says 2650 CUDA Cores for the 1080 not 2560.

 

[Fleet33]

Article doesn't mention if "Async Compute" is enable in their DX12 benchmarks. Clearly trying to paint the 1080 in good light.

Fail journalism, no excuse for this simple(intentional) mistakes.

 

[boju]

There wasn't much whooha between the 780Ti and 980 but there was with the 980Ti. Same thing i see here between the 980Ti and 1080, not much whooha but we'll probably see more incentive with the 1080Ti.

 

[varun706]

Please stop using the godawful slides for the benchmark results. They don't load properly everytime..

 

[Vesalius1]

I hope we get to see some SLI HB benches soon. Looks to be promising

 

[HeeroYu1]

Having recently upgraded from a gtx670 to a gtx980ti I am already astounded playing all my games on ultra settings at 1440p resolution. I eant to upgrade but I think its best to go a minimum 2 year graphics card rotation.

Call it a gut feeling but I expect the 1180 series will come with 8/12Gb HDM instead of GDDR5X and that means smaller cards or more cooling space.

Plus the obligatory 10% frame rate increase against their 10X0 series.

 

[photonboy]

Seriously though, what's the point in pitching a 1080, a Titan and a 980 Ti against each other in Witcher 3 (which ironically was the benchmark I was most interested in) when you can't see a performance difference because of the 60 FPS cap? Couldn't you have provided a test without that limit? I'm sorry, but I simply don't understand why this might have been a sensible choice.

They showed a 4K benchmark with all games below 60FPS so you can just use those results and estimate 1440p values.

 

[mapesdhs]

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. ...

It did cause a big fuss for sure, but the silly part about that row was that the card they compared to (EVGA GTX 460 FTW 850MHz) was actually by far the best value card available at launch at the time (I bought two, in SLI they left a 480 in the dust). In that sense they were doing readers a favour.

Comparing to stock has its merits of course, level playing field and all that, but alas over time such reviews become ever less useful as a quick reference because factory oc'd cards inevitably become cheaper than reference models, and eventually many sellers stop selling reference models entirely. This happened recently when I built a 980 Ti system for a friend, most sellers I checked did not stock any reference models. I bought the EVGA FTW which is 1190MHz base (1291 boost), so it would be somewhat higher up in these charts, say within 10% or so of the 1080 for BF4/GTAV @ 4K.

It's a pity there are no synthetic results here for the 1080 such as 3DMark, eg. here's a Firestrike Extreme result for the 980 Ti I tested.

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.

I agree, that would be an interesting test.

Perhaps though, in time, improved drivers will allow the 1080 to make better use of its changed architecture.

... My 980 ti is not just going to suddenly not be able to play games over the next two years so i can wait.

Trouble is of course, as time passes, the load imposed by ever newer games also goes up. However, you can always add a 2nd 980 Ti.

Ian.

 

[Amdlova]

2560x1440 above 60 fps... i don`t need this card. =) i will wait for amd products!