Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 review: The most badass graphics card ever created - clementexquided

At a Glance

Expert's Military rank

Pros

• Outrageous performance leap over GTX 980
• Hugely power efficient
• Attractive premium aim
• Many new features

Cons

• Doesn't fluff away Radeon cards in hard AMD-optimized games

Our Verdict

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 is the inaugural graphics card made-up using 16nm technology after GPUs stalled on 28nm for four long years. The performance and power efficiency gains are nothing brusque of astounding.

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"It's lunatic," Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang with pride proclaimed at the GeForce GTX 1080's discover, material possession the graphics card aloft. "The 1080 is psychotic. Information technology's almost unaccountable amounts of carrying into action… the 1080 is the bran-new king."

He wasn't joking. The long, waste years of stalled GPU technology are concluded, and this beast is badass.

A giant leap for GPU-openhearted

As wondrous as it is, the outrageous execution leap of the GTX 1080 (opening at $599 MSRP, $699 Nvidia Founders Edition reviewed) doesn't on the nose come as a surprise.

Faltering nontextual matter processor process technology left graphics cards from both Nvidia and AMD marooned along the 28-nanometer junction transistor guest for four long years—an nearly unfathomable distance of time in the lightning-fast world of modern technology. Plans to move to 20nm GPUs fell by the wayside cod to technical woes. That means the 16nm Pascal GPUs beating inside the GTX 1080's heart (and AMD's forthcoming 14nm Polaris GPUs) represent a leap of two full process generations.

That's nuts, and it alone could create a Brobdingnagian theoretical leap out in performance. But Nvidia didn't stop there.

Pascal GPUs adopted the advanced FinFET "3D" transistor technology that made its first mainsteam appearance in Intel's Ivy Bridge computer processors, and the GTX 1080 is the beginning art placard powered aside GDDR5X store, a powered new version of the GDDR5 memory that's come standard in graphics cards for a few years now.

The front PCB of the GeForce GTX 1080.

On top of every that, Nvidia invested significantly in the new Pascal architecture itself, particularly in tweaking efficiencies to increase time speeds while simultaneously reducing power requirements, too as many more under-the-hood goodies that we'll perplex to future—including enhanced in series cypher features that should help Nvidia's cards execute better in DirectX 12 titles and combat a major Radeon reward.

Oh, and did I mention all the new features and performance-enhancing package landing aboard the GTX 1080?

Eminence: Because this is a stellar GPU advancement, we'll expend more than time than regular discussing under-the-toughie details and technical school specs. If that's non your thing, jump to page two for treatment on the GTX 1080's outsize inexperienced technical wonders and page trio for its new consumer-facing features. Functioning talk starts along page four.

Let's kvetch things bump off with an Nvidia-supplied spec sheet comparison of the GTX 1080 vs. its predecessor, the GTX 980. (Side mark: The mere fact that the company's comparing the GTX 1080 directly against the GTX 980 is noteworthy. Usually, GPU makers compare new artwork card game against GPUs two generations noncurrent in review materials. The GTX 960 was compared against the GTX 660—not the GTX 760—in Nvidia's official materials, for example.)

Hither, roughly of the benefits to switching to 16nm jump come out immediately. Spell the "GP104" Pa GPU's 314mm2 die size is considerably littler than 398mm2 die in the older GTX 980, it nonetheless manages to squeeze in 2 billion more transistors overall, as well Eastern Samoa 25 percentage more than CUDA cores—2560 in the GTX 1080, versus 2048 in the GTX 980.

A block diagram of the Pascal GPU's Streaming Multiprocessor design.

And find out your jaw! The GTX 1080 indeed rocks absolutely ridonkulous 1,607MHz base clock and 1,733MHz (!!!!) boost clock speeds—and that's just the stock speeds. We managed to zigzag IT to concluded 2GHz on broadcast without breaking a perspiration or tinkering with the card's voltage. Add information technology all in the lead and the new graphics card blows its predecessor out of the piss in both gaming performance and compute tasks, bounce from 4,981 GFLOPS in the GTX 980 every the way to 8,873 GFLOPS in the GTX 1080.

Diving even deeper, each Pascal Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) features 128 CUDA cores, 256KB of register file capability, a 96KB distributed memory unit, 48KB of L1 memory cache, and eight texture units. Each SM is paired with a GP104 PolyMorph locomotive that handles vertex get, tessellation, viewport transformation, vertex impute frame-up, perspective chastisement, and the intriguing new Simultaneous Multi-Projection technology (which we'll bewilder to later), accordant to Nvidia.

A group of five SM/PolyMorph engines with a dedicated raster engine forms a Graphics Processing Cluster, and at that place are quaternity GPCs in the GTX 1080. The GPU also features eight 32-minute memory controllers for a 256-bit retentivity bus, with a total of 2,048KB L2 stash and 64 ROP units among them.

A block diagram of the full GP104 Pascal GPU inside the GTX 1080.

That segues nicely into another subject advance in Nvidia's card: the memory. Despite rocking a 256-bit bus the very size as its predecessor, the GTX 1080 managed to push the whole storage bandwidth all the way to 320GBps, from 224GBps in the GTX 980. That's thanks to the 8GB of with-it Micrometer GGDR5X memory inside, which runs at a vituperative 10Gbps—a full 3Gbps faster than the GTX 980's already speedy memory. How fast is that, really? Nvidia's GTX 1080 whitepaper sums IT up:

"To assign that travel rapidly of signaling in context, consider that light travels only about an inch in a 100 picosecond interval. And the GDDR5X IO electrical circuit has less than half that time available to sample a bit as it arrives, or the data will be unsaved as the bus transitions to a new set of values."

Implementing such speedy memory required Nvidia to redesign both the GPU tour architecture American Samoa well as the card channel between the GPU and memory dies to exacting specifications—a process that will also benefit graphics cards equipped with standardized GDDR5 memory, Nvidia says.

How the GTX 1080's delta color memory compression reduces memory bandwidth demands.

Pascal achieves symmetric greater data transfers capabilities thanks to enhanced memory compression technology. Specifically, it builds on the delta coloring material compression already establish in today's Maxwell-supported nontextual matter cards, which reduces memory bandwidth demands of grouping like colors together. Present's how Nvidia's whitepaper describes the engineering:

"With delta color compression, the GPU calculates the differences 'tween pixels in a block and stores the block American Samoa a placed of reference pixels nonnegative the delta values from the reference book. If the deltas are half-size then only a few bits per picture element are needed. If the packed together result of reference values plus delta values is less than incomplete the uncompressed storage size, then delta color compression succeeds and the data is stored at half size (2:1 compression)."

The early Pascal GPUs perform 2:1 delta color compression more effectively, and added 4:1 and 8:1 delta color compression for scenarios where the per-pixel color pas seul is minimal, such as a darkened night pitch. Those are targets of opportunity, though, since the compaction needs to be lossless. Gamers and developers would gripe if GeForce cards started piece of ass with persona quality.

Victimisation coloration compression to reduce memory needs isn't new at all—AMD's Radeon GPUs likewise do it—but Nvidia says that between this new, more effective form of compression and GDDR5X's benefits, the GTX 1080 offers 1.7x the total effective memory bandwidth of the GTX 980. That's not shabby at whol, and it takes some of the sting tabu of the card's lack of revolutionary high-bandwidth memory, which debuted in AMD's Radeon Fury cards, albeit in capacities moderate to 4GB.

The Pascal GPU's technological enhancements and jump off to 16nm FinFET also make it incredibly power efficient. Despite firmly outpunching a Titan X, the GTX 1080 sips exclusive 180 watts of power complete a single 8-pin tycoo connector. By comparison, the GTX 980 Titanium sucks 250W through 6-pin and 8-pin connectors, while the 275W Fury X uses a pair of 8-pin connectors. The GTX 1080 does a lot more performance with a lot less might.

Next page: New features! Async work out, synchronal multi-projection, and more

The GTX 1080's answer to AMD's async compute

AMD's Radeon card game hold an ace in the hole when it comes to games founded on Microsoft's radical new DirectX 12 graphics applied science: asynchronous compute engines.

This dedicated hardware fundamentally allows sevenfold tasks to cost run concurrently. The async shaders didn't ply much of an advantage in DirectX 11 games, which run tasks in a mostly linear style, but they rear turn over certain DX12 titles a stellar performance boost, Eastern Samoa you'll see in our Ashes of the Singularity benchmark results later. And it can make a prima remainder in the asynchronous timewarp feature that the Oculus Rift VR headset uses to keep you from blowing chunks if at that place's a hiccough in processing.

Nvidia's Maxwell GPU-based GeForce 900-series card game wear't accept a ironware-based tantamount for that. Instead, they depend on software-founded "pre-emption" that allows a GPU to pause a task to perform a Thomas More critical one, then flip-flop back to the original task. (Recollect of it like a traffic signal.) Maxwell's pre-emption gets the subcontract done, but nowhere come on as well as AMD's sacred hardware (which behaves more care the flow of cars yielding in dealings).

Pascal GPUs introduces various new hardware and software features to beef upwardly its async compute capabilities, though no conduct exactly like the async ironware in Radeon GPUs.

The GeForce GTX 1080 adds flexibility in task carrying into action with the introduction of dynamic load balancing, a new hardware-founded feature that allows the GPU to adjust task partitioning on the fly rather than letting resources sit idle.

With the static partitioning technique used exclusively by wholly previous generation GeForce cards, resources for overlapping tasks each claimed a fate of the GPU resources available—let's say 50 percent for PhysX cypher and 50 percent for graphics, e.g.. But if the graphics finishes its task first, that 50 percent of resources allocated to it sits unwarranted until the compute share also completes. The Pascal GPU's new active cargo partitioning allows unhewn tasks to tap into slug GPU resources, so the PhysX task in the previous exercise gains accession to the resources procurable when the artwork task wrapped up, which would obviously allow the PhysX task to finish earlier than information technology would with the older static partitioning system.

A fluid particle demo shown at Nvidia's GTX 1080 Editors Clarence Shepard Day Jr. hit 78 frames per second base with the boast disabled, and climbed to 94fps when IT was turned on.

The Pascal GPU also adds "Pixel unwavering pre-emption" and "Thread level pre-emption" to its bag of async tricks, which are designed to help oneself downplay the cost of switching tasks on the tent-fly when time-carping tasks (like Optic' in series timewarp) come in hot.

Previously, preemption occurred at a fairly high rase of the computing process, between rendition commands from the game engine. Each rendering command terminate comprise of up to hundreds of individual depict calls in the command push buffer, Nvidia says, with each draw play call containing hundreds of triangles, and each triangle requiring hundreds of individual pixels to be rendered. Performing completely that work ahead switching tasks fanny carry a long-handled time. (Well, comparatively speaking.)

Pixel level preemption—which is achieved using a blend of hardware and software, Nvidia says—allows Pascal GPUs to bring through their stream workload at picture element-level granularity rather than the high rendering command state, switch to another time-critical job (like asynchronous timewarp), and so pick up on the nose where they left off. That lets the GTX 1080 preempt tasks quickly, with minimal overhead; Nvidia says pixel-dismantle preemption takes under 100 microseconds to beef into geartrain. We'll talk about real-world results with Pa's new async work out tools when we dive into our DirectX 12 testing with Ashes of the Singularity. (Spoiler warning signal: They're impressive.)

Ribbon level pre-emption will be acquirable later this summer and performs likewise, merely for CUDA computing tasks instead than graphical commands.

Synchronic multi-projection

Coincident multi-projection (SMP) is a highly intriguing rising technology that improves performance when a game needs to try treble "viewports" for the one game, follow it for a multi-monitor apparatus or the dual lenses exclusive a essential reality headset. A more than granular SMP feature article can also greatly better frame rates in games on classical displays by building on the foundation laid by the multi-resolution shading feature already enabled in Nvidia's Maxwell GPUs.

This fancy unaccustomed technology's at the fondness of Nvidia's call that the GeForce GTX 1080 is faster than two GTX 980s configured in SLI. The card ne'er hits that lofty milestone in traditional gaming benchmarks—though it can number jolly damn shut in some titles. But information technology's theoretically affirmable in VR applications coded to take reward of SMP, which uses dedicated hardware inside the Blaise Pascal GPU's PolyMorph railway locomotive hardware.

Displaying scenes happening multiple displays traditionally involves both kinda compromise. In dual-lens VR, the scene has to have its geometry fully calculated and the scene fully rendered twice—once for each middle. Multi-monitor lizard setups, then again, tend to distort the imagination on the periphery screens, because they're angled slenderly to envelop the user, As shown higher up. Guess of aboveboard line haggard across a objet d'art of newspaper: Folding the paper in uncomplete makes the occupation appeared slightly angulate instead of truly straight.

Simultaneous multi-projection separates the geometry and rendering portions of creating a scene to doctor both of those problems. The Pascal GPU calculates a fit's geometry just once, past draws the scene to match the exact perspective of up to 16 different viewpoints A requisite—a proficiency Nvidia calls "single-pass stereo." Any parts of the tantrum that aren't in see aren't rendered.

Perspective surround renders scenes in multi-monitor setups correctly.

If you're using SMP with multi-monitors rather than a VR headset, new Position Surround settings in the Nvidia Control Panel will let you configure the output to match your limited setup, so those straight lines in games nobelium longer appear angulate and render as the developers intended. Sweet!

But that's not all simultaneous multi-projection does. A proficiency called "lens-matched blending"—the part that builds on Maxwell's multi-reticuloendothelial system shading—pre-distorts turnout images to match the warped, curved lenses on VR headsets, rendering the edges of the setting at lower resolution rather than rendering them at full fidelity and throwing totally that work away. Like SMP's divorced-overtake stereo, the idea is to render only the parts of the image that will actually be seen by the user in rules of order to improve efficiency.

Brad Chacos

Obduction's lonesome-screen exhibit of coincidental multi-projection frame rate benefits.

Interestingly, lens system-matched shading can also be victimised to improve overall frame rates flatbottomed on traditional single-display setups. In a single screen demonstration of Obduction, Cyan Worlds's future spiritual successor to Myst, physique rates hovered about 42fps in a particular scene with SMP disabled at 4K resolution. Activating SMP caused frame rates to jump on to the 60fps maximum subsidised by the exhibit, and you could lone detect the rock-bottom picture element fidelity at the edges of the display if you were standing calm down and actively looking for blemishes.

Simultaneous multi-projection is fascinating, potentially portentous stuff—and that's why IT's a major bummer that developers own to explicitly add support for it, and IT works lone on GeForce cards running happening Pascal GPUs. It's a killer marketing point for the GTX 1080, simply whether games will patronise a feature film that excludes all graphics card sold up until today is a big interrogation point.

Future Sri Frederick Handley Page: Cool spick-and-span consumer-facing GTX 1080 features

Ansel: The supercharged future of screenshots

Speaking of large cool features limited to Nvidia's new art cards, at that place's Ansel, which Nvidia calls "an in-halting 3D camera" and I call the charged future of screenshots.

Kind of than plainly capturing a 2D image like Steam's F12 functionality, Ansel lets you pause a game, then freely roam the environment with a floating tv camera (though developers will be able to disable available roaming in their games if desirable). You're able to apply a individual filters and effects to the scene using easy-to-use tools, as shown in the epitome below, also as crank the resolution to idiotic levels. Nvidia plans to departure much filters as time goes on, summation a station-processing shader API so developers can make over custom filters.

In a demo of Ansel running on The Attestator, for case, I was able to jack the resolution to a whopping 61,440×34,560. Out of the box seat, the tool bum support up to 4.5-gigapixel images

Nvidia's Ansel volition give you the ability to take a Kodak second in a video game.

Creating a masterpiece care that takes Ansel individual transactions to stitch together files of considerably large size, however. Ansel snaps equal to 3,600 smaller images to capture the entire scene—including 360-degree pictures that can beryllium viewed in a VR headset or even Google Cardboard—and processes them with CUDA-based sewing applied science to make a scrubbed, final icon that doesn't need some additional inflammation or tone-correspondence tweaks. It's also capable of capturing RAW operating room EXR files from games, if you flavour suchlike tinkering about in HDR.

Ansel's a driver-tear down tool, and games volition involve to explicitly code in corroborate for information technology. On the plus English, doing so takes minimal movement—Nvidia says The Find's Ansel support required 40 lines of inscribe, while Witcher 3's integration took 150 lines. The company besides plans to offer Ansel for Maxwell-based GeForce 700- and 900-series graphics cards. Look to The Naval division, The Attestor, Lawbreakers, Witcher 3, Paragon, Unreal Tourney, Obduction, No Man's Sky, and Fortnite to roll forbidden Ansel sustain in the coming months.

How Fast Sync fixes reaction time and tearing

The GeForce GTX 1080 has a big problem: It's almost overly reigning, at least for the popular e-sports titles with decent visual demands. Running Return-Strike: Global Offensive, League of Legends, or Dota 2 on a modern high-end graphics batting order can mean your ironware's pumping down hundreds of frames per second, blowing away the refresh rates of most monitors.

That puts gamers in a pickle. The disparity betwixt the monitor's refresh rate and the intense frame outturn can create screen tearing, a nasty artifact introduced when your monitor's showing results from numerous frames at once. Simply facultative V-sync to fix the way out adds high latency to the game arsenic it essentially tells the entire railway locomotive to slow down, and ill-smelling latency in the fast worldwide of e-sports can couch you at a serious competitive disfavour.

The new Double-quick Synchronize option in the GTX 1080 aims to resolve both problems by separating the rendering and displays stages of the graphics process. Because V-sync isn't enabled, the game engine spits out frames at full speed—which prevents latency issues—and the artwork bill uses flip system of logic to determine which frames to skim to the display in fully, eliminating CRT screen tearing.

Some excess frames will be cast aside to maintain smooth frame pacing, Nvidia's Tom Peterson says, but remember that Degenerate Sync's made for games where the frame rendering rate output signal far exceeds the refresh rate of your monitor. As a matter of fact, enabling Fast Sync in games with standard couc rates could theoretically introduce stuttering. So yeah, don't do that.

The results seem efficacious. Here are Nvidia-supplied latency measurements tested with CS:GO.

Look for Fast Sync to expand beyond Pa-based graphics card game in the approaching. "Wait [GPU support] to be fairly broad," says Peterson.

GPU Boost 3.0

Nvidia's rolling out a possibly slayer new overclocking addition in the GTX 1080, dubbed GPU Boost 3.0.

The preceding methods of overclocking are soundless supported, but GPU Boost 3.0 adds the power to customize clock frequency offsets for individualist voltage points in order to eke prohibited every tiny little chip of overclocking headroom, instead than forcing you to use the same clock speed offset crosswise the board. Overclocking tools testament scan for your GPU's theoretical uttermost clock at numerous emf points, then apply a custom V/F curvature to match your specific card's capabilities. It takes all the guesswork proscribed of overclocking, letting you crank performance to 11 with minimal hassle.

Nvidia supplied reviewers with an early, mildly janky copy of a modern EVGA Precision X build that supports GPU Boost 3.0, and finding then pushful your card's limits proved pretty straightforward. Settings let you opt the minimum and maximum time speed offset to mental test, as well as the "pace" value, or how much the clock frequency increases from unity offset to the next. After my card repeatedly crashed with Precision X's normal OC scanner settings, decreasing the step value increase from 12.5MHz to 5MHz calmed things cut down—but also caused the scan session to become abominably slow.

If I'd had clock time to let it execute in full, I would've been left with a highly granular overclocking profile specific to my individual GPU. But because the tool landed my hands late in the testing process, I went the manual path, overclocking the GPU by hand over with a copy of the Unigine Heaven benchmark. I'll contribution the final results in the performance section.

HDR and DRM affirm

The GeForce GTX 1080 continues Nvidia's custom of supporting technology built for home house PCs. After the GTX 960 and 950 became the first major graphics card game to support HDCP 2.2 for proprietary 4K videos over HDMI, the GTX 1080 embraces pinched slashing range television technology, a.k.a. HDR. HDR displays boost brightness to create more range between darkness and light. American Samoa deltoid as IT sounds, the improvement in visible quality is borderline startling—I think the difference betwixt HDR and non-HDR displays is much more impressive than the leap from 1080p resolution to 4K displays. AMD's Polaris GPUs will also patronage HDR.

Pascal GPUs endure HDR gambling, as well as HEVC HDR video encoding and decryption. Pairing the GTX 1080 (and its HEVC 10b encoding abilities) with an Nvidia Buckler Android TV console (and its HEVC 10b decoding abilities) enables another bully trick: GameStream HDR. Basically, you can stream a PC game from your Pascal GPU-equipped computer to your TV via the Nvidia Shield, and because both devices support HDR, those deep, deep blacks and spirited colors bequeath appear connected your television screen simply fine. It's a smart way for Nvidia to purchase its ecosystem and wench around the fact that HDR display support is modest to traditional televisions right now, though IT North Korean won't roll impossible until afterwards this summer.

Currently, Obduction, The Attestator, Lawbreakers, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Ideal, The Talos Principle, and Phantasm Warrior 2 are the only games with pledged HDR support, though you can expect more than titles to embrace the engineering science as hardware support for it becomes more widespread.

​Pascal GPUs are also certified for Microsoft's PlayReady 3.0, which allows protected 4K videos to be played on PCs. Presumably thanks to it, Pascal-based graphics cards will beryllium fit to stream 4K content from Netflix at some point later this year. Embrace 4K television on the Microcomputer means embracement Windows 10 and DRM as well, IT seems.

The Nvidia GTX 1080's port natural selection.

To obtrude all those decorated new videos, the GTX 1080 packs a unity HDMI 2.0b connection, a single dual-unite DVI-D connecter, and three full-sized DisplayPorts that are DP 1.2 certified, but fix for DP 1.3 and 1.4. That readiness enables support for 4K monitors running at 120Hz, 5K displays at 60Hz, and even 8K displays at 60Hz—though you'll need a pair of cables to tally that last scenario.

Succeeding page: Testing frame-up, SLI changes, and WTF is the GTX 1080 Founders Edition?

High-bandwidth SLI bridges

Nvidia's qualification just about humongous changes to the way it handles multi-GPU support in the wake of DirectX 12. Opening with the GTX 1080, Nvidia will proffer rigidly constructed elated-bandwidth Harry Bridges dubbed SLI Haemoglobin, which occupy not one, but both SLI connectors on the artwork batting order to handle the high flow of selective information flowing between the cards.

Brad Chacos

To match that designing—and presumptively to cut applied science costs happening 3- and 4-way configurations that few people use—Nvidia's graphics cards will officially support lonesome 2-direction SLI going forward, though 3- and 4-way configurations will be unofficially substantiated with help from an Nvidia tool you'll have to download severally.

It's a massive shift, and i we explore in more depth in a disunite clause about the GTX 1080's SLI tweaks.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Version

The SLI changes don't count in this review, as we have only a divorced Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition to test. Confusion reigned in the stir up of the Founders Version's hazy reveal, but in a nutshell: It's what Nvidia used to call its reference design. There's no hefty overclock or cherry-picked GPUs whatever. Here's the curve: While the MSRP for the GTX 1080 is $600, the Founders Edition costs $700.

Spell there's no question a little of an early adopter's fee going on here—the Founders Version is the only GTX 1080 guaranteed by Nvidia to be available on English hawthorn 27—the pricing isn't as wild as IT seems when first seen.

Nvidia's recent GeForce reference card game are marvels of premium engineering. The GTX 1080 continues that trend, with an three-cornered formed aluminum body, vapor chamber cooling system that blows air out of the rear of your political machine, a low-profile backplate (with a section that can be removed for cleared air flow in SLI setups), and new under-the-hood niceties like 5-phase dual-FET design and tighter electrical excogitation. It screams "premium" and oozes quality, and the polygon-like design of the metal shroud is more than appealing—and subtle—than early leaks indicated IT would cost.

Brad Chacos

The GTX 1080 (bottom) sports a more angulate design than the GTX 980 (top). Complete the angles are more obtrusive under direct light.

But previous-gen Nvidia point of reference cards were paragons sold at a loss lone during the premiere few weeks close to found in order to kickstart adoption of parvenue GPUs. Nvidia plans to sell its Founders Variation cards for the GTX 1080's lifetime. That lets Nvidia faithful buy up directly from the company and allows boutique system of rules sellers to evidence a azygos GTX 1080 model for their PCs over the lifetime of the card, rather than worrying about the ever-dynamical specifications in mathematical product lineups from Nvidia partners like EVGA, Asus, MSI, and Zotac. As a matter of fact, Falcon Northwest owner Celt Reeves told HardOCP that helium actively lobbied Nvidia to create these cards for just that reason.

You'll probably exist able to find graphics cards from those board partners rocking hefty overclocks, additional power connectors, and custom cooling setups for the same $700 price Eastern Samoa Nvidia's Founders Edition once the GPU starts rolling out en masse. Put differently, the Founders Edition probably won't exist a worthwhile purchase going forward if sheer price-to-operation is your major concern. But that $100 agio is bluff enough to keep EVGA and its ilk from acquiring miffed about the new direct competition from Nvidia, patc tranquil allowing Nvidia to meet system builders.

Just decent chit-chat. It's prison term to get word how badass this wildcat really is.

Examination the GTX 1080

As always, we time-tested the GeForce GTX 1080 on PCWorld's consecrated graphics card benchmark organization, which was built to avoid potential bottlenecks in other parts of the machine and show off true, unfettered graphics performance. Key highlights of the build:

• Intel's Core i7-5960X with a Barbary pirate Hydro Series H100i out of use-loop water cooler, to get rid of any potential for CPU bottlenecks affecting graphical benchmarks
• An Asus X99 Deluxe motherboard
• Corsair'sVengeance LPX DDR4 memory, Obsidian 750D full tower vitrine, and 1,200-James Watt AX1200i ability supply
• A 480GB Intel 730 series SSD
• Windows 10 Pro

On with upgrading the trial organisation to Windows 10, we also updated our list of benchmarking games with a well mix of AMD Play Evolved and Nvidia-centrical titles, which we'll mother into as we dive into performance results.

To see what the GTX 1080 Founders Edition is truly made of, we compared it against the book of fact $500 GTX 980 and $460 MSI Radeon 390X Gaming 8GB, and also the $650 Radeon Eumenides X and $1,000 Titan X. Because the GTX 980 Ti's carrying out closely mirrors the Titan X's—and Nvidia successful a distributor point to repeatedly compare the GTX 1080 against the Titan X—we didn't test that calling card. Sadly, AMD never sent us a Radeon Pro Duo to examination, so we can't tell you whether the GTX 1080 or AMD's dual-Fiji beast is the single well-nig reigning graphics card in the world.

But the GTX 1080 is easily, hands-down, nobelium-comparison the most powerful idiosyncratic-GPU graphics card ever released—especially when you overclock it.

Ignoring the auto-overclocking tools in the Preciseness X exploratory, I was healthy to manually encouragement the core clock speed by 250MHz and the memory clock fastness by an additional 100MHz. Depending on what was going happening in a given game's given scenery, and how Nvidia's GPU Boost technology reacted to information technology, doing so resulted in time speeds ranging from 1,873MHz to 2,088MHz. Yes, that's time speeds in excess of 2GHz on air, with no voltage tweaks.

In other run-in: Heave up. This is expiration to be a wild ride.

Next page: The Division and Hitman benchmarks

The Division

First up: Ubisoft's The Class, a third-person shooter/RPG set that mixes elements of Destiny and Gears of War. The game's set in a gorgeous and gritty recreation of post-apocalyptic New House of York, running on Ubisoft's spick-and-span Snowdrop engine. Despite incorporating Nvidia Gameworks features—which we out of action during benchmarking to even the performin field—the plot scales well across all ironware and isn't part of Nvidia's "The Way It's Meant to be Played" lineup. In point of fact, it tends to perform better on Radeon cards.

Until the GTX 1080 enters the ruffle.

American Samoa you can see, the credit GTX 1080 offers a large 71-percent performance increase finished the GTX 980 at 4K resolution and Immoderate graphics settings. The GTX 1080 is designed as a generational replacement for the GTX 980, remember—non the Titan X. That said, the GTX 1080 outpunches the Titan X by 34.7 percent at 4K, and 24 percent at 1440p resolution, despite costing $400 to a lesser extent than Nvidia's flagship.

Hitman

This redoubtable polish off-simulating sandbox's Glacier engine is heavily optimized for AMD titles, with Radeon card game importantly outpunching their GeForce GTX 900-series counterparts, especially at higher resolutions. Because of that, while the GTX 1080 offers a meaning performance leap over the GTX 980 (72.7 percent at 4K) and Titan X (33.8 percentage), the performance gain over the Fury X is much more inferior (8.8 pct) with all settings cranked to Ultra and FXAA enabled. That drives home how important in-engine support for a particular nontextual matter architecture can comprise.

Note that these results are using DirectX 11. Hitman theoretically supports DirectX 12, but a recent update broke it, and the game refused to launch in DX12 happening both PCWorld's GPU testbed as well as my personal gaming swindle despite seemingly being set. Unfortunately.

Next page: Go up of the Grave Raider benchmarks

Get up of the Tomb Raider

The gorgeous Rise of the Tomb Raider scales middling well across entirely GPU hardware, though it clearly prefers the Titan X to the Rage X once you reach the superior echelon of graphics cards. But that doesn't really matter to, because the performance gains with the GTX 1080 are insane—especially once you overclock it.

The GTX 1080 pushes 70.5 per centum more than frames than the GTX 980 at 4K resolution on the Precise High graphics setting (Nvidia's HBAO+ and AMD's PureHair technology disabled). The gap increases to a whopping 94.5 percent after overclocking. That's damn near twice the performance.

Wow. Barely scream.

The performance increase over the Titan X is a more mild 29 pct, just that leaps to a full 47 percent overclocked. The Fury and Fury X's defeat here is likely modified to HBM's 4GB memory electrical capacity, as the game specifically warns that enabling Very High textures can cause problems on cards with 4GB Beaver State less of memory.

We didn't include carrying into action results from RoTR's DirectX 12 mode Here because running IT really causes norm frame rates to drop across the board, but it's important to bank bill that DX12 besides caused minimum framework rates to increment by double-digits across the room. That means playing the game in DX12 results in fewer frames, but fewer bumble.

Next paginate: Far Cry Primordial

Far Cry Primal

FAR Cry Primordial is another Ubisoft game, but running game on the latest version of the polysyllabic-respected Dunia engine that's been underpinning the serial for years now. We tested these GPUs with the game's clear 4K HD texture inner circle enabled.

IT scales fortunate, though the Fiji GPU's super-locked countertenor-bandwidth memory gives AMD's Fury cards an edge at high resolutions. The tables turn at get down resolutions. At 4K/Ultra, the GTX 1080 offers a 78-percent performance increase over the GTX 980, and a 33-percent gain of the Titan X and Wildnes X.

Succeeding varlet: Ashes of the Singularity and DX12

Ashes of the Singularity and DX12

We were hoping to run the GTX 1080's DirectX 12 carrying into action in several games, but Hitman and Jump of the Tomb Freeboote's DX12 implementations left United States wanting for the reasons previously discussed. Windows Hive away-entirely DirectX 12 games aren't really usable for benchmarking ascribable the intrinsical limitations of Windows Store apps. That left us with a single DX12 game to test: Ashes of the Singularity, running happening Oxide's custom-built Nitrous engine.

AoTS was an early ease off-bearer for DirectX 12, and the public presentation gains AoTS offers in DX12 terminated DX11 are emotional—at least for AMD cards. AoTS's DX12 implementation makes heavy use of asynchronous work out features, which are subsidized by dedicated hardware in Radeon GPUs, but not GTX 900-series Nvidia card game. As a matter of fact, the software package pre-emption workaround that Maxwell-based Nvidia cards use to mimic the async compute capabilities tank performance and then hard that Oxide's game is coded to ignore async compute when it detects a GeForce GPU.

That creates some interesting takeaways in performance benchmarks. Maxwell-founded Nvidia GPUs actually perform worsened in DirectX 12 style, spell AMD's Radeon cards see massive performance gains with DX12 enabled—to the point that the Fury X in DX12 is healthy to essentially equal and sometimes even outpunch the extension GTX 1080's service line DX11 results, even though the GTX 1080 clobbers the Fury X's DX11 results. That's a loud win for AMD.

That said, once you take the pedal off the metal and look at results below 4K/crazy, the GTX 1080 starts to see decent performance increases in DX11 vs DX12 performance, though it ne'er nears the mammoth leaps that Radeon artwork card game enjoy. At 1440p/high settings, shifting to DirectX 12 gives the GTX 1080 a 20.3-percent performance leap. Therefore, even thoughAoTS explicitly disables basic async figure out in Nvidia cards, the new async compute enhancements Nvidia's built into Pascal backside indeed bring home the bacon tangible benefits in DX12 games with heavy async cipher usage.

Looking directly at Nvidia-to-Nvidia performance, the GTX 1080 provides frame rate increases similar to what we've seen in other games: Roughly 72 pct to a greater extent carrying out than the GTX 980, and 35 to 40 percent over the Titan X.

Next page: Virtual reality and 3DMark Fire Take up results

SteamVR benchmark and virtual reality

The biggest bummer for ME in that review is that VR benchmarks haven't been able to keep up with graphics technology.

Nvidia's biggest claim to carrying out renown with the GTX 1080 lies in virtual reality. While the conventional performance games are sizeable enough, Nvidia's loftiest performance claims—faster than two GTX 980s in SLI! 2.7x execution increases!—are firmly tied to VR games that make fully use of Nvidia software like simultaneous multi-projection. Unfortunately, the mealy VR benchmark tools coming from Crytek and Basemark haven't hit the streets, and no released VR games support the GTX 1080's new-sprung software features yet. That leaves us with no agency to measure the GTX 1080's potential execution increase over the competition leave out for the SteamVR benchmark, which is better for determining whether your rig is capable of VR than address tete-a-tete GPU comparisons.

Oh well. In whatsoever case, the GTX 1080 is the inaugural graphics card to ever push the PCWorld graphics testbed all the way to 11 in the SteamVR bench mark—though the Titan X and GTX 980 Ti came damn close before.

3DMark Kindle Ten-strike and Fire Strike Ultra

We also tested the GTX 1080 using 3DMark's highly respected Evoke Strike and Fire Strike Ultra synthetic benchmarks. Fire Strike runs at 1080p, while Fire Take up Ultra renders the same scene, but with more main effects, at 4K resolution.

No surprise here later seeing the in-game results: Nvidia's other card absolutely whomps on complete comers, becoming the firstly art card to A-one the 5000 score barrier in Fire Chance on Ultra. Heck, the Fury X is the only other card to evening break 4000, and yet then just barely.

Incoming page: Power and temperature results

Power and heat

Finally, let's take a look at the GTX 1080's power and hot results.

Every of AMD's recent graphics card game use vastly more power than their Nvidia counterparts, full stop. The GTX 1080 only uses 20 watts many power under immoderate load than the GTX 980, and considerably less power than a hot-and-bothered Titan X, steady though it pushes out significantly more performance. The Pascal architecture is so incredibly power-efficient, in other dustup.

Power is measured by plugging the entire system into a Watts Awake meter, so running a stress tryout with Furmark for 15 minutes. It's au fon a whip-case scenario, pushing graphics card game to their limits.

Connected the disrespectful side of the coin, the GTX 1080 runs slightly hotter than the GTX 980 under a Furmark load, hitting temperatures connected a equality with the Titan X. (The water-cooled Hysteria X is the outlier in the results.) Furmark truly is a worst-case scenario here, though—temperatures during genuine gameplay tended to hover approximately 70 to 75 degrees Celsius—and the cooling scheme on reference work cards are ne'er as efficient As custom third-party solutions. Take care for temperatures to strike down significantly in impost versions of the identity card.

Next page: Bottom air

A new king

So we'ray back to where we started: Nvidia's starting time long-hoped-for Pascal-based graphics card truly is a beast in every sensation of the word, cracking performance records spell veritably sipping on power.

The leap over the GTX 980 is nothing short-term of insane. While the GTX 980 delivered frame rates close to 18 to 35 percent higher than its direct predecessor, the GTX 780, the new GeForce GTX 1080 surges ahead by a whopping 70-summation percent in every bet on tested. That's crazy. The full meter I was testing this monster, I felt alike St. David Archer at the remnant of 2001: A Space Odyssey, staring wide-eyed into a new world full of stars. Moving on from 28nm GPUs is every bite As wonderful as gamers had hoped, and the GTX 1080 is everything Nvidia promised and more.

Hail the conquering hero, indeed.

Nvidia's powerhouse isn't quite an capable of hitting 60fps at 4K in all back, As the results from Division and Far Cry Primal show, but it's awfully close—especially if you invest in a G-Synchronise reminder to smooth out sub-60fps gameplay. And it's worthy noting that game engine optimization can play a sizable role in potential performance as the disparity inHitmanandAoTS results between AMD and Nvidia cards clearly show. Regardless, the GTX 1080 annihilates everything you have at information technology.

Don't rush to bend your human knee to the freshly crowned champion evenhanded yet, though. Follow patient. Give it a a couple of weeks.

AMD promised that its Polaris GPUs would show up in the middle of the yr, and numerous leaks hint that its big debut leave come at Computex in earliest June. Every meter reading from the ship's company seems to suggest that its initial Polaris salvo will target more mainstream prices rather than opening from the top like the GTX 1080, but who knows? AMD's Radeon cards are leaping to 14nm FinFET technology A well, and if Team Red has something up its sleeve, things could get very interesting, very quickly. That goes doubly so if Radeon card game continue to reserve a commanding lead over Nvidia in DX12 async compute performance.

Ready a few weeks will also likely give custom cards from Nvidia's card partners time to trickle into the securities industry, and who knows how graduate those beasts bequeath be capable to fly? Plus, the GTX 1070 is scheduled to hit the streets on June 10 with what Nvidia claims is Titan X-level performance—and at $370, information technology's most half the damage of the GTX 1080 itself. Considering that the GTX 1080 delivers about a third more performance than the Titan X, the GTX 1070 whitethorn assume the GTX 970's position as the enthusiast price/carrying into action sweet spot in Nvidia's lineup. Patience is a chastity!

Similarly, I'd counsel GTX 980 Ti and Titan X owners to sit tight before bolting out the door for a GTX 1080. Sure, Nvidia's new poster outpunches the 900-series heavyweights, simply it doesn't render them obsolete—and can you imagine how judgment-blowing a full-fat GTX 1080 Ti or Pascal-supported Titan would be, if the GTX 1080 rump dress this?

Father't feel for bad if you can't resist the impulse to grab a GTX 1080 though. A Pa-founded Titan would be supposed to set up earlier spring 2022, and Nvidia's hot flagship is men-down the unweathered beau ideal for graphics cards. The GTX 1080 is badass incarnate.

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Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/414859/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-review-the-most-badass-graphics-card-ever-created.html

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