Nvidia's GTX 1070 is slightly faster than a Titan X and GTX 980 ti, reveals 3DMark benchmark
Real, tangible benchmark data is starting to emerge from both of Nvidia's new Pascal-powered graphics cards, the GTX 1080 and 1070, and it's confirming what their creators have been saying since the announcement. This is a big generational performance jump, so big that the $449/£372 Founder's Edition of the GTX 1070 can outperform the Titan X. You may remember the Titan X from fairy tales - it's the card that only the three richest kings in all the land can afford, carrying a $1000/£850 price tag.
Feeling confident about the heft of your current hardware? Set it against the best VR games on PC and see how your frame rates do, then report back. Godspeed.
Over at Videocardz they've pitted the GTX 1080 and 1070 against both Nvidia and AMD's most powerful cards from the current generation - Maxwell GPUs such as the Titan X, 980 ti and 970 in the green corner, and Fiji/Tonga GPUs such as the R9 Fury X, Fury, 390X and 390 in the red corner. All cards ran 3DMark's Fire Strike benchmark, a hellishly demanding few minutes jam-packed with particle effects, steam coming from every surface, and a very abstract sword fight, and could consequently be ranked in order of their performance score.
While it's no big surprise that the GTX 1080 came up top of the rankings - it's what Nvidia have been saying it should do, after all - the 1070's performance is very impressive by comparison. Here are the full range of cards, in order of score:
3% faster than a Titan X - with a few provisos, naturally. This is the more expensive Founder's Edition of the 1070, and that percentile relates to a fairly abstract score from a synthetic benchmark. It doesn't tell us exactly how much higher the frame rate was for the GTX 1070 in any of the three Fire Strike benchmark runs at normal, extreme and ultra settings.
Still, according to that - admittedly abstract - data, the GTX 970 has just 58% of the performance of its new replacement, and the gap between the 980 and 1080 is similar, with the former offering 52% of the newer card's performance. That's a big generational jump.
For many GTX 970 owners, it's a real dilemma whether to upgrade yet based on the 1080 and 1070's performances. Sure, you'll have a more powerful card, but will that simply amount to getting 200 fps in the games you play rather than 90? And is that worth $400-$600? It depends on your monitor's native resolution, the types of games you play, and whether you're likely to buy a VR headset anytime soon. If you're gaming perfectly happily at 1080p and clocking the long shifts with CS:GO and Dota 2, a GTX 1070 is not a wise purchase. If you're putting together a triple-monitor display, each outputting at 4K, and want to play The Witcher 3 at max settings... you're a maniac. But the new cards are worth looking into, yes.
Same website also claim that AMD's new 480X will beat the 980.
I'm waiting for proper benchmarks before doing anything.
Same! Might be looking at upgrading my 290 soon...
Considering that the 1080 only manages an average of 50 fps in the Witcher 3 at 4k max settings, and Nvidia has announced that they're dropping support for SLI past 2 cards... I don't think that a triple-monitor 4k Witcher 3 setup is going to be happening anytime soon. Shame. :(
But SLI past 2 cards is unstable and almost always isn't worth it. 3-4 way SLI can cause bad performance and terrible stuttering.
True, but that's a software problem. On which side (driver vs game) I honestly don't know. Look at games like Crysis 3 and Sniper Elite.
Point being that if Nvidia kept supporting it, and CDPR supported it... Even then with a 1080 you wouldn't get very good performance for 3x 4k monitors.
What should ideally happen for 4k & beyond is games being built on engines that support multiple individual graphics cards and utilize them fully. This is already how some professional video applications & GPU 3D render engines work, but it has to come from the software developer, not the hardware manufacturer. But it's pretty beautiful, the idea of buying a new GPU, and then keeping your old GPU in the case for additional speed, or getting dual identical GPU's, and literally getting the full 200% performance. It's not just possible, it's already been done - for years. Someone needs to add that functionality to their game engine.
Is it the driver or the game engine? I honestly don't know, but I know there are games that utilize SLI/Crossfire quite well, like Crysis 3.