it has been quite some time since NVIDIA has graced us with a new 80 series GPU
20 months in fact since the last one so we got the gtx 1080 in hands it felt
like a momentous occasion especially with the vive and the oculus rift so
recently hitting market and since NVIDIA is building their new
1080s pascal architecture as one of their most ambitious projects yet and
saying that it can beat out their flagship titan x and a pair of 980s in
sli i think it's time to see if it can live up to the hype
so the gtx 1080 is their first card in their new line of pascal gpus continuing
the tradition of NVIDIA naming new generations of gpus after old dead guys
who were legendarily good at physics and math and speaking of math the cards
gp104 GPU can certainly do a lot of processing with 2560 cuda cores
1733 megahertz base clock and a 16
nanometer process which is able to allow them to pack way more transistors onto
the chip for increased performance NVIDIA also switched to a new type of
vram called gddr5x which runs at about 10 gigabits per second NVIDIA says that
gddr5x combined with various improvements like memory compression it
ends up being 1.7 times faster in terms of effective memory bandwidth than a gtx
980. they crammed eight gigabytes of this stuff inside the 1080 but if you
are more inclined to go for the 1070 when that comes out it also has 8
gigabytes but just more standard gddr5
so keep that in mind if you will be disappointed by buying a product that
has slightly less x's on its product sheet
but beyond raw specs there were also some other features that NVIDIA baked
into the pascal pie such as simultaneous multi-projection which allows pascal to
project 16 different viewports each with the ability to rotate in order to better
match the current display setup that you have and it has the ability to project
more than one of these viewports at once this enables graphics techniques such as
perspective surround which can correct image perspectives across multiple
monitors so you don't get that weird warping on multi-monitor surround
anymore and like massive scale issues and stuff that should be fixed then
there's a personal favorite of mine single pass stereo this allows pascal to
render geometry for an object in vr only
once instead of twice per eye then it just uses simple transforms to generate
the view for both eyes but if you're not really into vr and you
want something for the desktop side never fear there's something for you as
well and that's called multi-res shading NVIDIA included multi-res shading for
the desktop guys as well it allows you to focus more of your GPU power near the
center of the screen and less on the outside this will result in higher
resolution and detail in the middle and lower resolution and detail on the
outside where you are theoretically paying less attention to this should
help performance but we'll see if it really matters later on
when used for vr various smp techniques including the ones not fully covered
here equate to 1.5 times the pixel
throughput and two times the geometry throughput than would otherwise have
been possible then there's ansel technology which was introduced to take
gaming screenshots to the next level which sounds like the most boring thing
possible but just hang with me it allows you to take screenshots from any angle
and position by using a free-floating camera that can detach from your
character it also allows you to run simple filters over these images for
that oh so professional instagram look it also allows you to take raw or exr
photos giving you full dynamic range for all your image editing needs it takes
said photos or screenshots in super resolution which is currently limited to
4.5 gigapixel images with 3600 cuda stitched
tiles this limitation is because of game settings the resolution of the game and
the speed of your storage drive so it should actually be expected to increase
in the future and last but not least is 360 degree photos so you can capture
those legendary fight scenes in awesomely unique ways and then view them
in vr or whatever although when all is said and done i expect most of the
pictures from ansel will be using the free camera to capture derpy faces of
npcs ansel does have to be enabled by the
developer and right now there's only a relatively short list of games that
support it and i wouldn't expect a huge amount of multiplayer games to either
yes the division is included but i think it's not going to be in the dark zone
that's it for ansel and then we come to vr works audio and vr works touch vr
audio can trace the physical path of sound to give you a more realistic
experience while you're using a headset and vr touch uses phys x to improve on
how things in the environment react with your virtual hands both of these should
make pretty good improvements in terms of immersion in the future once they're
more implemented now we got our hands on the founders edition which sounds fancy
but is really just what NVIDIA is calling the reference version of this
card and is selling for 6.99 a full
more than the msrp for base models from add-in partners whose cards i expect to
see at computex like they were last time so stay tuned to Linus tech tips for
that NVIDIA is trying to justify the higher cost by saying that they're using
premium components in manufacturing like die cast aluminum and a low profile
backplate along with a vapor chamber which should improve cooling but it's
important to note that the chips in the founder's edition boards shouldn't be
binned in any way the cooler for the 1080 is similar to the silver and black
shrouds and blower style fan that we've seen NVIDIA doing for quite a while now
but has a more angled aggressive look reminiscent of basically every
environment in the last deus ex game the connectivity support is good as it
features HDMI 2.0 for 4k at 60 hertz
three displaypoint 1.4 connectors for 4k at 120 hertz or 8k at 60 hertz holy crap
and a dual link dvi however the 1080 only supports two-way sli natively even
though it has two sli fingers that is because the 2s live fingers have been
teamed together to improve bandwidth with the new sli bridge NVIDIA no longer
recommends three and four-way sli which is probably a good thing to be honest
but they do suggest if you need to burn that much money on that many cards that
you do two-way sli and have a third card just for phys x but it is possible to
force three-way and four-way sli if you sign up for NVIDIA enthusiast key which
registers your card i expect an even worse experience from this form of sli
than past versions of sli and would wholeheartedly
not recommend it all in all NVIDIA has called this the largest chip processor
endeavor in the history of humanity with a multi-billion dollar budget which
NVIDIA's ceo speculated might be enough to go to mars but as NVIDIA is in the
business of making gpus not sending people off to other worlds for
interplanetary lan parties let's move on and just a note if it
seems like we don't have a lot of AMD cards in our testing it's because the
new polaris AMD architecture which is supposed to compete with pascal is right
around the corner it's not quite here yet we'll have much more from the red
team when those cards drop with that being said let's have a look at how the
benchmarking turned out all the testing was done at 4k because what's the point
of running things at lower res when you have the power of something like a 1080
and speaking of which if you do have this nice setup but a 1080p monitor it's
better to run your games at higher resolutions anyways with super sampling
and then just have them displayed on your 1080p monitor if you're wondering how to do that check the guide up here
we are waiting for the vr games market to mature a bit before we test it very
much because it's a little bit messy right now but we did throw crisis 3 and
star wars battlefront at the 1080 and various other cars to see how they would
perform and the 1080 solidly beat the fury x and titan x and then ran right
alongside the sli 980s which was quite impressive having a single card run toe
to toe with a dual card setup while being just over half the price is a
strong start for our new funny-named friend for directx 12 performance we
booted up rise of the tomb raider and hitman the 1080 pulled off some
impressive numbers crushing the titan x and laughing at the 980s as they flopped
around and confused sli enabled circles as they struggled with poor dx12
optimizations AMD's performance here was stronger than the 900 series but the
1080 was still able to manage an overall victory
while those numbers were a little bit all over the directx 11 performance for
these games was more of a standard curve with performance expectations lining up
nice and orderly if you're aiming for 4k at 60fps then the 1080 will not
disappoint as it's able to run everything on high presets near or above
60 frames per second proving the respectively cheaper and when looking at
the titan x better performing option on the NVIDIA side for power draw the
entire bench only drew 252 watts from
the wall which gives you a ton of options in terms of lower wattage
power supplies or even sfx power supplies and whatnot the thermals were
standard fare from NVIDIA with all of our cards holding steady at around 81 to
83 degrees celsius sorry NVIDIA's claims about it beating a
titan x and sli 980 is true i'd say
mostly it does cleanly beat the titan x across the board but putting it up
against a 980 duo is a bit more of a mixed bag it won some of the benchmarks
but lost others the loss is however at least in actual games were quite narrow
and in any event the 1080 is clearly the better choice for newer games especially
when they have dx12 support and it frees you from the well documented issues with
sli for dollars per frame we're assuming a value of 599 for the 1080 in our
calculations as we expect whatever you're able to get from the add-in board
partners should either match or beat the reference founders edition card while
being a hundred dollars cheaper so this dollars per frame is for pascal 1080 in
general not the founders edition the 1080 blows everything away in this
metric except for the r9 390 x in hitman
specifically but when you consider that the 390x has lower frame rates across
the board it's still a pretty darn compelling value to get an aftermarket
1080. so what's our conclusion well for 599 dollars if that is your budget for a
card the 1080 is a no-brainer it's ability to hit 60fps at 4k with lots of
eye candy in the latest titles combined with per frame cost that's basically the
lowest in the world of high-end graphics cards right now it's a pretty obvious
choice again if that is your budget we still haven't gotten a single GPU card
that can run 4k games at 60fps with max
settings without breaking a sweat and at 600 the 1080 is still pretty steep in
terms of pricing but it is the king of the hill for now it'll be interesting to
see what results we can get with overclocking as NVIDIA is claiming a lot
in that department and how well AMD's polaris will answer this challenge
especially once directx 12 games hit the market later this year thanks for
watching guys hopefully the animal noise is
weren't too annoying this was filmed in mexico we are not back yet um although
the embargo will be like six hours after we land or something so
if you liked the video like it if you disliked it and you were like this was filmed in a ghetto way and there's
animal noises you can dislike it be subscribed if you
want to see more coverage of the 1080 if it's anything like 980 we'll release a
lot of videos on it uh if you want a t-shirt that's cool you can check out
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code to buy stuff like new gpus in the next little while polaris
pascal which one you get which p are you deciding to go for i don't know it's up
to you uh yeah check out this video this is the launch
video for the gtx 980. i don't know why you would watch it right now but go
watch it anyways and i'll see you next time