Why Is the 1080 Price Through the Roof Again

A review like this doesn't come along often. Sure, nosotros review graphics cards and their graphics processing units (GPUs) several times a year. Only this time around, we are reviewing not simply an all-new Nvidia flagship graphics carte du jour, namely the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 (Founders Edition) ($699), just one that's based on an entirely new architecture, also, involving a shrink in the manufacturing process used to make the fries.

This only happens once in a while. In fact, the last time we saw this was fashion back in 2012 with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680, in parallel with Nvidia's launch of its "Kepler" architecture. Nosotros're not here to talk about Kepler, though. We're here to discuss the new child in town. That's Nvidia'southward 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 (nm) process using "3D" FinFET transistors, and according to Nvidia it's "the new male monarch" of the GPU globe. That's certainly a bold claim, but as our benchmarks show, it is, indeed, the fastest gaming GPU we've ever tested.

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The rex-making merits also isn't entirely surprising, since every time a new GPU with a new architecture launches, it's more often than not faster than what preceded it. But this time around it'south almost shocking only how fast it is, and how large the bound. You'll have to meet the benchmark tests we ran to believe information technology...and then let's become started.

How Nosotros Got Here

Earlier nosotros dive into Pascal, let's take a brief walk downwards memory lane to empathise how we arrived at this juncture in GPU history.

Back in 2012, Nvidia launched its "Kepler" architecture, which marked the company'southward leap from a 40nm silicon fabrication procedure to a much smaller 28nm procedure. (This figure in nanometers is essentially the size of the transistors used in the graphics-processor silicon.) When this number goes downwards, information technology'southward a big deal, and this issue is known as a "die shrink." Every bit the size of the transistors gets smaller, thank you to advancements in manufacturing technology, it allows Nvidia (or its competitor AMD) to pack a lot more transistors into the same size die it was using previously. That allows it to improve performance without being lazy and just creating a bigger silicon die.

One time Kepler had finished its run in the marketplace, anybody expected Nvidia to exercise what it had ever done in the past, which is to shrink its fabrication process once more. (Nvidia doesn't really make the silicon itself, merely just 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 make-new GPU using the new, smaller process. That didn't happen, and an official caption was never given equally to why. But instead of shrinking its process, Nvidia soldiered on with the same 28nm dice it used to make Kepler cards for its successor series, which was named "Maxwell."

Interestingly, competitor AMD did exactly the same thing, standing on with its 28nm GPUs for a second get-around, too. Then at that place must accept been diminishing returns at 20nm that made information technology a fool'southward errand to pursue. Or perhaps there was a problem with the silicon manufacturers themselves (TSMC, in the instance of this card) being able to proceed upward with demand, alongside the push for smartphone chips and other in-demand devices. Though Nvidia's Maxwell compages was indeed a lot faster and more efficient than Kepler, information technology was due to savvy engineering science and the maturity of the 28nm process. Maxwell was excellent for its time, merely it never quite achieved the same breakthroughs in performance that normally accompanies a die shrink.

Now that Maxwell has finished its run, Nvidia has gone ahead and moved to a new fabrication process, this time going all the manner down to 16nm. As a two-generation leap from 28nm, 16nm is allowing Nvidia to make radical improvements in both performance and efficiency. The outset 16nm gaming card to hit the market is the GeForce GTX 1080 we are reviewing today. It's the first card to land in our test bed that was fabricated using the all-new process and Nvidia's "Pascal" compages.

Inside Pascal

Nvidia's Pascal GPU not only uses a smaller 16nm process than Maxwell, merely it also uses a newer type of transistor, named FinFET. With FinFET, transistors get stacked in 3D space, as opposed to laying them down side-past-side. Merely 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 e'er has before. And more transistors in the same space typically equals meliorate performance.

Just how many more transistors? In the case of the GeForce GTX 1080, it's 2 billion more...yes, with a "B." The previous-generation equivalent to the GeForce GTX 1080 card, the GeForce GTX 980, sported five.2 billion transistors. The GeForce GTX 1080 has 7.2 billion, even though the size of the die remains unchanged.

What's amazing is that despite having that many more transistors, the thermal design power (TDP) rating for the GeForce GTX 1080 is only xv watts higher than that of the GeForce GTX 980. (Information technology's rated as consuming 180 watts, compared to the GeForce GTX 980'southward 165 watts.) What'southward even more incredible is that the GeForce GTX 1080 should be remarkably more than powerful than the GeForce GTX 980, with very little "cost" in terms of the power required.

Farther proof of Pascal's energy efficiency is the fact that the GeForce GTX 1080 requires just i eight-pivot PCI Express power connector off your system's ability supply, equally opposed to the dual 6-pin connectors that the GeForce GTX 980 demands. This is the first flagship GPU we've ever seen that uses only ane ability connector.

Another benefit of Nvidia's transition from 28nm transistors to the new 16nm FinFET process is a dramatic increase in possible clock speeds. The Kepler and Maxwell cards' clock speeds typically hovered around 1GHz or so, with the occasional chip able to hit i.3GHz or one.4GHz. But with the GeForce GTX 1080, the base—heed you, base—clock speed is a staggering 1.6GHz, with a boost clock able to hit 1.73GHz nether certain atmospheric condition. Nvidia is always a scrap bourgeois with citing the ceiling of these baseline clocks, besides, and so we can look the cards to go much higher than this. At the launch of the carte du jour Nvidia said squeezing an additional 300MHz or then out of a GTX 1080 would be no big deal, and it showed a carte du jour running at 2.1GHz on the stock cooler as well. We weren't quite able to eke out such high stable clock speeds with our review carte du jour, but getting to 2GHz wasn't much of a trouble. (More on that later in the Operation department, below.)

Ane "feature" that's also new with Pascal is the introduction of a "Founders Edition" version of the menu, which is replacing the term "reference card" in the video-card vernacular. Nvidia's typical practice was to create a reference design of a new GPU to send to its card-making partners so that they could use it to build their own version of the cards, typically with fancier coolers than the stock versions and higher clock speeds. Non so anymore, as the version Nvidia builds, and which will now sell directly to consumers for the life of the product, is a premium edition, not a sample baseline model. The take hold of is that the Founders Edition of the GeForce GTX 1080 costs $100 more than than the "standard" version, which volition sell for $599. That means the Founders Edition, which nosotros tested, costs $699.

We're not sure 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 hadn't seen any of them as of press time. But Nvidia took pains during the course of its product announcement to allow everyone know information technology had spent considerable engineering resources designing its GPU. Not simply is it highly overclockable, the company told usa, but it runs absurd and quiet, and information technology has premium components throughout, including vapor-bedchamber cooling and even a backplate, which is rare amid Nvidia-designed cards.

The GTX 1080 also features a blower-style blueprint that exhausts heat out of the chassis, which is favored past Nvidia in its stock-carte du jour GPU designs. Most, if non all, of Nvidia'south partners typically offer menu designs with coolers that exhaust rut inside the case as opposed to expelling it from the rear edge. So in that location is a benefit to Nvidia'southward blower pattern, peculiarly for those using it in a cramped or small-form-cistron chassis. The blower design is besides useful when yous've got several cards installed in an SLI arrangement, equally one bill of fare doesn't transfer the bulk of its estrus to the side by side card by blowing hot air straight on it.

The New Shape of SLI

Speaking of SLI, Nvidia is besides introducing a new connector with the GeForce GTX 1080 that doubles the bandwidth available, compared to the previous SLI solution. Information technology'due south named the "SLI HB Span," the "HB" being for "High Bandwidth," and uses a two-lane configuration, as opposed to the unmarried lane used by the previous connector.

The downside to this approach is that the GeForce GTX 1080 supports only ii cards in SLI, as information technology uses both connectors on the carte du jour. In the past, the start connector was used to go to the first pair of cards, and the second connector was used to become to another card in the chain. You could keep going all the way down the concatenation with upwards to 4 GPUs. Nvidia states that iii and four-way SLI is theoretically still possible using DirectX 12 features if developers include them, but it's "non recommended."

Too, 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 fourth dimension of the May 27 launch of the GTX 1080 to allow defended SLI hounds to "unlock" the iii-manner and four-fashion SLI characteristic of the GTX 1080 card. It will involve running an app to place your card and trigger a request for a software "Enthusiast Key" from Nvidia, which will let for SLI across two cards.

This change in SLI policy isn't that big of a deal, really, every bit we imagine the number of people running four elevation-finish video cards could nearly fit inside our visitor'due south lunchroom. Besides, scaling drops considerably across two cards in SLI, and you also run across the issue of the performance existence bottle-necked by the CPU.

It'south also 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 event.

Specs and Design

Permit's accept a expect at the card itself first, then we'll get into some new technologies that Nvidia announced at the same time equally the GeForce GTX 1080. Some of them are sectional to this new GPU.

Similar all previous high-cease GeForce cards designed by Nvidia, the GeForce GTX 1080 is a dual-slot card. (A few third-party "beast" GTX 980 Ti cards, among them the baking Zotac GeForce GTX 980 Ti Amp Extreme, take upwardly three slots.) The GTX 1080 is 10.5 inches in length, and is exactly the aforementioned meridian, width, and length as the GeForce GTX 980 (and in the same ballpark equally other loftier-end Nvidia GPUs). So cypher is new in the physical-layout department. Nvidia is supposed to exist switching from GDDR retention to Generation 2 of its Loftier Bandwidth Retentiveness (HBM) next twelvemonth, possibly with an ostensible consumer version of its "Big Pascal" bill of fare, which volition allow the retentivity to movement from next to the GPU to directly on the die. This volition free up a lot of space on the PCB, and allow for the GPUs to be a lot shorter, like we saw with AMD's Radeon R9 Fury. Merely for now, it's business concern as usual.

The biggest change nosotros tin can see in the GeForce GTX 1080 compared to all the prior generations is the solitary 8-pin PCI Limited power connector. That is a surprise, unheard of on a late-model flagship video menu. Every contempo GPU we've reviewed from Nvidia, aside from mainstream and entry-level ones, has required 2 PCIe connectors. Then the fact that this is a flagship GPU reportedly "faster than a Titan X" and with just one power connector shows you the gains in efficiency the motion to 16nm FinFET has produced (along with a piddling applied science by Nvidia, of class).

Out back, the menu sports five outputs, including three DisplayPort connectors that are certified for DisplayPort 1.ii just "ready" for the 1.three and 1.4 upgrades, according to Nvidia. Though DisplayPort ane.2 is sufficient to run a 4K (three,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 version i.4 ups information technology fifty-fifty more, to handle nascent 8K at 60Hz.

Out of the box, the GeForce GTX 1080'southward clock speed is an incredibly high one,600MHz, with a boost clock of one,733MHz. This is about 700MHz higher than what we're used to seeing on a high-stop Nvidia GPU, then it's a massive jump, and that doesn't even include overclocking numbers.

The card is designed to run cool and quiet as well, only like the previous generation. It sports 8GB of super-fast Micron-fabricated GDDR5X retentivity, which is a start in the GPU globe. The surprisingly low TDP of 180 watts is 70 watts beneath the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, GeForce GTX Titan X, and previous flagship GPUs.

New Technologies

Let'south take a brief look, in plough, at some of the new technologies that the GTX 1080 is bringing forth with it.

Ansel

Ansel is designed to allow for more than artistic control when taking in-game screenshots, which if, yous're similar us, probably wasn't something you considered needed improving, or idea much about. But it'southward a thing.

Dedicated gamers accept been taking very creative screenshots for a while now, merely they are, of course, limited by where the camera can go, and the resolution of the images. Ansel solves both of these problems by allowing for a free-ranging photographic camera in any game that supports information technology, and by letting you capture massive high-res screenshots.

In a demo Nvidia ran for the printing before the launch of the GTX 1080, it captured a scene at 20x resolution, and the resulting file was 3GB in size and 46,000 pixels across, or "46K" to use the popular nomenclature. The Ansel software, named after famed photographer Ansel Adams, also lets you utilise filters to your photos, in semi-Instagram fashion. You lot tin also rotate the horizon and brand other changes.

Ansel volition be a feature on games that determine to include it in their feature set, so information technology won't be something that is available in every game by default. You lot activate it with a key combination, which pauses the game and causes an overlay to appear that allows y'all to motility the photographic camera, make adjustments, and ultimately capture the frame. Nvidia says this feature is supported on Pascal and Maxwell cards.

Simultaneous Multi-Project (SMP)

People who use three monitors, or who are into virtual reality (VR), will be excited nearly this engineering science, as it could mark a large jump forwards for both of these usage cases. What SMP does is permit the GPU to project into 16 "viewports" simultaneously and in stereo. What this means for the VR world is a massive increase in rendering speed, every bit the previous generation of cards had to render each middle in sequence.

The GTX 1080 tin can do both displays in one pass, still, which is why you heard things from Nvidia about how it's "twice as fast as a Titan X..." and and then off to the side of the PowerPoint presentation it said "...in VR." It will also allow yous game on several monitors at once, and if y'all run three monitors with the side monitors angled towards you, it's able to reduce the distortion that occurs on objects and more accurately projection one image across all three monitors. You lot can sentry the demo hither...

...and as it states, the original project is right if all iii monitors are side-by-side. It's when you lot pull the side ones toward you lot that things become wonky. SMP fixes this issue, and it looks neat too.

Fast Sync

We all know what familiar sometime V-Sync is: It syncs the frame-rate output of the GPU with the refresh rate of the monitor (typically 60Hz or 60 frames per second) or an even divisor of it. This produces gaming that is gratis from tearing, but information technology locks the height frame rate at 60fps, which is non ideal for a lot of e-sports competitors (apparently, we're non them).

The solution, then, is to turn off Five-Sync, which lets the GPU run at full speed. Simply when you are running a actually loftier frame rate, you can experience latency, which is too bad for e-sports. To fix both of these problems, Nvidia has developed a new syncing mode named "Fast Sync," and it's only advisable to utilise it in scenarios with extremely loftier frame rates.

Nigh Our Tests

Things are a bit in flux these days when information technology comes to testing GPUs, equally there are ii emerging technologies that this carte du jour was built for that are difficult to test. The offset is DirectX 12 (DX12), which is just now coming on the scene. There are very few real-world benchmarks for it. Notwithstanding, DX12 volition likely be the standard graphics API in the future, and this menu was designed to last for a few years, if not longer. So it is important to know if a card tin handle DX12 well before ownership.

We tested the GTX 1080 with all the newest DX12-capable games nosotros had on paw, including Hitman (the 2016 edition), Ascent of the Tomb Raider, and Ashes of the Singularity. We tested a load of games using DirectX eleven, too, because that API will still be in wide use for at least another yr, and probably much longer.

The second technology that's difficult to examination now is virtual reality, or VR for short. The GeForce GTX 1080 was built to run VR twice every bit fast as its predecessor, and in all the launch presentation documents Nvidia specifically referred to the card'southward VR performance, as that was what the company wanted to highlight. However, there are two major competing VR technologies, in the form of the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, with more than coming to market place soon, and it'southward difficult to establish a lonely test that is applicable to all scenarios.

Steam has its own VR benchmark, but at the time of this writing, it didn't output a score. Instead, it just indicated whether or not your PC was prepare 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 bill of fare, the GTX 1080 and the Cadre i7 CPU in our test bed would hands pass this examination.

Futuremark is also working on an upcoming VRMark test, merely information technology was only in beta when we wrote this, and it refused to run on our test bed, even after making sure the benchmark was up to date. We'll have to wait for future, finalized VR benchmarks. Merely if y'all're considering buying a GTX 1080 primarily for VR, you tin rest assured that current VR-ready games and those launching in the near time to come will run on this carte du jour just fine. Information technology well exceeds the minimum recommendations.

3DMark (Fire Strike)

Nosotros started off our testing with Futuremark'south 2013 version of 3DMark, specifically the suite'south Fire Strike subtest. Burn down Strike is a synthetic exam designed to measure out overall gaming performance, and Futuremark has expanded Fire Strike nowadays into three subtests. In the past, we used the basic exam (known simply as "Fire Strike"), also as the more than demanding Fire Strike Extreme exam. But these GPUs are and so powerful that we had to move up to the most punishing test, Burn down Strike Ultra, which is geared toward simulating the stresses of gaming at 4K.

As the nautical chart shows, the GeForce GTX 1080 dominated right out of the gate, besting every bill of fare that stepped up to it, including the quondam champ, 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 lxx watts less power, has fewer CUDA cores, and uses a narrower memory bus (though faster GDDR5X memory). This only goes to testify the benefits that moving to a smaller process, refining the architecture, and enabling insane clock speeds tin provide.

Tomb Raider (2013)

Hither, nosotros fired up the 2013 reboot of the classic title Tomb Raider, testing at Ultimate detail and 3 resolutions.

In our showtime "real earth" test, nosotros can see the GTX 1080 is going to be a force to be reckoned with, every bit it was more than than 60 percent faster than the GeForce GTX 980 GPU that it replaces, which is an incredible leap in performance from one generation to the side by side.

In the past, we usually saw jumps in the neighborhood of 20 to 25 percent from, say, a GeForce GTX 680 to a GeForce GTX 780, so this is 1 heck of an increase. We also encounter in our tests at 3,840x2,160 that the GeForce GTX 1080 will likely be the first single GPU capable of striking sixty frames per 2d at 4K, which was not possible at all with the previous generation of GPUs.

Sleeping Dogs

Next, we rolled out the very demanding real-world gaming benchmark test built into the title Sleeping Dogs...

In Sleeping Dogs, we once once more see the GeForce GTX 1080 towering over the competition, improving on the performance laid down by the GTX 980 by threescore per centum once again. It was a smidge slower than the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X in this test at 4K, however, only by only 2fps, which is shut enough to phone call it essentially a necktie. The Radeon R9 Fury X has always been a beast at loftier resolutions due to its ultra-fast HBM memory, but the GTX 1080 roughly matches information technology at 4K here and, at lower resolutions, the R9 Fury X and other cards in this grouping are simply no threat.

Bioshock Infinite

The popular championship Bioshock Infinite isn't overly demanding, as recent games go, only it's a popular one with stellar proficient looks. In its born criterion program, we gear up the graphics level to the highest preset (Ultra+DDOF)...

This was a hard-fought boxing, as the results in this test were closer than other tests, most likely due to the relatively undemanding nature of this game. Not surprisingly, the GeForce GTX 1080 even so came out on meridian, and at 1440p performed around 50 percent faster than its predecessor, which is quite impressive. It was only 10fps faster at 4K than the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, but that's still a 20 percent reward. The GTX 1080 was also able to hit 69fps at 4K in this criterion, allowing for silky-smoothen super-loftier-resolution gaming.

Hitman: Absolution

Adjacent up was Hitman: Absolution, which is an aging game simply still pretty hard on a video card.

By at present, it's no surprise that the GeForce GTX 1080 topped the charts. The merely question is by how much? The examination that blew our minds this time around is the 1440p run, where the GTX 1080 ran more than 80 per centum faster than the GeForce GTX 980. This is the kind of operation bound nosotros haven't seen in several years, certainly not from a single generation to the next.

Far Cry Fundamental (Ultra)

Ubisoft's latest open up-earth first-person hunting game is one of the most demanding titles we use, thanks to its lush leaf, detailed shadows, and otherwise incredible environments.

This test very clearly illustrates the benefits of upgrading from a GeForce GTX 980 to a GTX 1080, as nosotros see that 4K gaming was not really playable at elevation settings on the GeForce GTX 980 at 25fps, simply is much more acceptable (at 41fps) with the GTX 1080. That's a big improvement, and one that can justify an upgrade, as opposed to gaining "just" a 20 percentage or so improvement in certain titles.

Like the previous titles, we saw the GTX 1080 post peak scores across the board, and while its functioning of 41fps at 4K is a lot better than 25fps, every bit we previously noted, this falls brusque of the 60fps required for gameplay that's silky-smoothen. Perhaps an eventual GeForce GTX 1080 Ti will be able to handle it.

Ashes of the Singularity

Oxide's Ashes of the Singularity is a bit of a divergence as a benchmark, as it's a real-time strategy title, rather than a commencement-person shooter or a third-person action title. Due to the planet-calibration nature of its battle scenes, with hundreds of onscreen tanks, ships, and other implements of future warfare, it can be extremely demanding at high settings. And considering of the plethora of rendered units, this game is besides more CPU-bound—especially at loftier settings and resolutions—than most other recent games.

Due to the CPU-heavy nature of this title, the scores here are much closer than they were anywhere else in our testing. Still, the GTX 1080 nevertheless dominates here, edging out the previous-generation GTX 980 Ti. At 4K resolutions, the new card looks its all-time, adding several frames per 2nd over what whatever other bill of fare offered upward.

Grand Theft Motorcar Five

Every bit one of the most pop game franchises on the planet, G Theft Auto really needs no introduction. The fifth installment took a lot longer than many expected to land on the PC. Only when information technology finally did in early 2015, information technology brought with it a number of graphical improvements and tweakable visual settings that pushed the game far beyond its console roots.

In one case once more, the GTX 1080 dominated here, easily besting the competition from AMD and Nvidia at all resolutions. Most impressively, it tacked on a full 15fps over the Radeon R9 Fury 10 and GTX 980 Ti at the highest resolution (4K).

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Lara Croft rises once again in the early on 2016 iteration of Foursquare Enix'south long-running action franchise. As our hero works to unfold an ancient mystery (and reveal the cloak-and-dagger to immortality) alee of the ancient and mortiferous Guild of Trinity, she traipses through a slew of complex atmospheric environments, from arid tombs to the frigid Siberian wilderness. A dynamic atmospheric condition organisation, and the complexities of Lara's wind-tousled hair, add to the game'due south visual complexity.

The operation tendency 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 nearly 10fps at the highest resolution, making for smooth game play on today'due south high-end monitors.

Hitman (2016, Under DX11) The newest game in the Hitman serial finds Agent 47 turning over a new leaf, and embarking on a journeying of self-discovery as a teacher at a school for underprivileged children. Just kidding; he kills a bunch of people in this one, merely like the rest. It does offer gorgeous graphics in both DX11 and DX12 varieties, though. We'll tackle the erstwhile first.

The AMD R9 Fury X managed to all-time the GTX 1080 for the first time here, at all resolution settings. As this is the commencement time nosotros've really used this benchmark, we're entirely not sure why. But AMD'south High-Bandwidth Retention might have something to practise with it. Regardless, at 4K, the GTX 1080 is shut enough to nearly call it a tie. And Nvidia's flagship easily bests its previous-generation cards on this exam.

It's tough to get any existent sense of DirectX 12 performance at this bespeak. 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 graphical differences between the titles running at DX11 versus DX12 settings. In some instances, titles running under DX12 offered performance gains, but elsewhere nosotros saw lesser operation. Also, under DX12, the 2016 Hitman championship locked up more than than in one case in our testing. And nosotros saw a few instances in Ascension of the Tomb Raider in which large chunks of the world failed to render at all. We noted missing trees and chunks of wall more than once in testing.

In other words, you should take the beneath results with a Gibraltar-size hunk of salt. DirectX 12 is still in its extremely early on stages, and those developers who have implemented it have yet to throw on the spackle and smooth over the cracks. We'll accept to expect at least a few more months to say for sure how much of an advantage DX12 offers, and whether it sways things in favor of AMD or Nvidia in any substantive way. Even so, considering this is a cutting-edge card and DX12 is cutting-edge tech, it's worth taking a look at what the GTX 1080 and its competition can do with Microsoft'southward latest gaming API today.

Rising of the Tomb Raider (Nether DX12)

This sequel to 2013's Tomb Raider is one of the first AAA titles to offering DirectX 12 back up. Nosotros used the preset labeled Very High for testing.

It's notable that the merely GPU that could run this game at 4K with a playable frame charge per unit and some overhead was the GTX 1080. The GTX 980 Ti was playable at that setting as well, merely only simply. This game only crushed the other GPUs at super high-res. The GTX 1080 also posted an astonishing 84fps at 1440p, which is nearly double what the GTX 980 was capable of, and four times what the Radeon R9 Fury X turned in at the same setting here.

Hitman (2016, Under DX12)

The newest Hitman title likewise offers up a DX12 graphics selection in its criterion which, similar Rising of the Tomb Raider, looked identical to our eyes to the DX11 version. Or at to the lowest degree information technology did when it wasn't locking up, which never happened nether DX11.

Though the GTX 1080 topped the charts in one case again (no surprise there), it did so past the smallest margins we've seen however, 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 strategy title Ashes of the Singularity was among the first to offer DirectX 12 support, even when it was notwithstanding in beta. Possibly unsurprisingly, then, information technology was too the most stable DX12 examination we ran, never one time crashing, locking up, or noticeably glitching when we ran it multiple times on a handful of high-end cards.

Here again, the GTX 1080 was the leader, but once again the AMD R9 Fury 10 wasn't far off. At least most of the cards here posted solid gains in frame rates over the DX11 version of the test. DX12 performance is still rather unsettled turf, and information technology remains to be seen what type of gains nosotros'll encounter when several developers implement a wide aspect of features, and which cards volition respond best to the new API.

Overclocking

We didn't have as much time every bit nosotros'd like to test overclocking. But using a beta version of EVGA'south Precision X utility, we were able to push our review card's clock speed upward merely above 2GHz, which is a threshold unheard of until this bill of fare, and a healthy 300MHz or so above the 1,733MHz superlative Heave Clock speed of the card.

That translated to a 3fps bump in FarCry Key at the Ultra setting and 4K resolution, and a 4fps boost to Hitman under DirectX 11 at 4K and loftier settings. Possibly with more than fourth dimension, we could have eked out a higher stable overclcock, but considering the bill of fare comes clocked much, much higher out of the box than whatever previous card, the fact that it could be pushed even higher is impressive. And of course, overclockability ofttimes varies from card to card, then your pixel boost may vary.

It's also worth pointing out that it was only when overclocking, with the side popped off of our test demote, that nosotros really noticed any fan noise on the GTX 1080 at all. Running at stock speeds, the card was remarkably quiet, even nether load. The fan was spinning, of course, so it wasn't completely silent. Only the bill of fare wasn't noticeably noisier than the 120mm fan on our Noctua CPU cooler, which is impressive for whatever high-terminate bill of fare. Considering the GTX 1080 is far and away the near powerful single-chip card nosotros'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 lot of times when writing conclusions to reviews of video cards like this, we have to resort to qualifiers such as "It's a great bill of fare if..." or "It's really fast, merely you might want to await..." or even "It's the all-time card at this price, only at that place's a card that is less expensive that is almost as expert." That is not the case this fourth dimension around.

The GeForce GTX 1080 is unquestionably the fastest single GPU in being at this fourth dimension, and by a wide margin, too. Not only does information technology offer as much as 80 percent more performance than a GeForce GTX 980, but it as well spanks the GeForce GTX 980 Ti past about 20 to 30 percent, and offers new technology that neither card supports. Nosotros're talking, of grade, almost the Simultaneous Multi Project, new VR capabilities, and high-bandwidth SLI, to name a few. If you're looking for the fastest GPU available, there is no question any it'south the GTX 1080, as it also pummeled AMD'due south $650 Radeon R9 Fury X in nearly every benchmark we ran.

In fact, it seems like the only upcoming GPU that might suppress sales of the GeForce GTX 1080 is the likewise-announced GeForce GTX 1070, which is a GPU we know very lilliputian about at this time. We know it'due south going on sale on June 10, and that information technology volition offering less performance than the GTX 1080 at a cost of $379. (A Founders Edition version will be $449.) That's a much more compelling cost point for the vast majority of gamers out in that location. It remains to be seen what kind of functioning the GTX 1070 volition offer, but we're certain a lot of gamers are holding off on pulling the trigger until that launch occurs.

As far as AMD goes, it's all silent on the Western Forepart, every bit they say. Nosotros know the company is planning on unveiling some details near its upcoming Polaris compages at Computex 2016, but those GPUs will reportedly be targeted at mobile and "mainstream," so it'southward doubtful any of them nigh-term will be able to lay a glove on the high-terminate Pascal GTX 1080 or GTX 1070. AMD has spoken of an upcoming "enthusiast" GPU, lawmaking-named "Vega," but it's rumored to be arriving after this twelvemonth, giving Nvidia costless reign to dominate the upper echelon of the gaming market for the summer of 2016, if not longer. Since AMD has as well moved to a much smaller 14nm FinFET process for Polaris and Vega, hopes are high that the visitor can challenge Nvidia just equally capably 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 new high-end bill of fare, the more than market share it volition likely lose, at least to well-heeled enthusiasts.

The only other consideration at this point in time is the fact that there's still the looming threat of a GPU based on "Big Pascal," which would be the full-size die of this architecture. You might non accept realized it, but the GTX 1080 is actually a cutting-downwardly version of the total-size chip, which is the norm for Nvidia launches. The company has previously launched a smaller version of its die first, then subsequently out a more powerful full-size chip, which has been in the past the GTX Titan variant. In this case information technology might be named the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti or perhaps GeForce GTX 1180. Just again, there's no telling when (or if) that menu will arrive in a grade aimed at gamers.

Our just existent reservation with the GeForce GTX 1080 is the $100 "Founders Edition" price premium that Nvidia is charging with this version of the card. It'south hefty, on a card that's already expensive, and information technology's unclear when cards will arrive at the promised $599 MSRP. We would urge the frugal and patient amid you to wait and see. Merely with high-cease cards like this, there's often express stock and pent-up demand (even when there isn't nearly this much of a operation boost), which drives up prices. That, combined with the fact that AMD doesn't seem ready to launch a rival to the GTX 1080 anytime soon, means it may exist months before we see not-Founders Edition versions of GeForce GTX 1080 cards selling at $599. Board partners like EVGA and Asus will certainly have no reason to drib the prices that low if demand remains high.

So, if you lot want a loftier-end card for 4K gaming and VR future-proofing, and can afford the hefty outlay, there's little reason not to plunk your credit carte du jour downward. No other single carte is likely to come close to the GTX 1080 before long, and we don't expect prices to drop much quickly. The GTX 1070 volition almost unquestionably be a better value for large numbers of shoppers. Only, then again, gamers playing in the high-cease video-card market, who want the absolute highest frame rates possible, never seemed to intendance a whole lot about that. We don't look them, with all that the GTX 1080 brings, to start now.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 (Founders Edition)

The Lesser Line

The GTX 1080 is far and abroad the fastest single GPU nosotros have ever tested, and is the showtime GPU that allows for true 60fps 4K gaming (and improved VR, too). It's a game-changing GPU in every sense.

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Source: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-founders-edition

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