Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 (Desktop) Review – Pascal has arrived

The GeForce GTX 1080 from Nvidia is the first consumer chip with the Pascal architecture and 16 nm FinFET. The new architecture promises significant efficiency improvements and some new features. We have a look at the latter in our article about the Pascal architecture here. This article focuses on the features and the performance of the desktop GeForce GTX 1080 based on the GP104, more precisely the Founders Edition from Nvidia. This version was designed and built by Nvidia and replaces the old "reference design". The Founders Edition, however, can be seen as a higher-quality version and is much more expensive at $699 (without taxes) compared to the less expensive 1080 cards, which will start at $599 (without taxes) according to Nvidia.

The Founders Edition uses high-quality materials, a vapor chamber cooling and a high-quality PCB. It is shipped with a single 8-pin power connector and offers 3x DisplayPort 1.4 ("ready"), one HDMI 2.0b and a dual-link DVI port. 8 GB GDDR5X video memory is also sufficient for today's standards.

Our test system for the following benchmarks is an Intel Core i7-4790K (not overclocked) on an Asus Z97-Deluxe motherboard, 16 GB DDR3-2133, Samsung SSD 840 Pro, OCZ Trion 100 and HGST 1 TB HDD.

Much more interesting is obviously the gaming performance in the 4K resolution with high details. The SLI scaling does not always work really well, so the GeForce GTX 980 SLI in the MSI GT80S 6QF falls behind the new GTX 1080 by 14% on average. A single GTX 980 is 41% slower; the R9 Fury performs a bit better with a deficit of 31%, but it cannot keep up with the GTX 1080, either. The mobile GeForce GTX 980M is clearly beaten and falls behind by 57%. All tested games were smoothly playable with these settings.

Praised as a new miracle weapon (by AMD in particular), we now finally have the first games with DirectX 12. However, we can see that the Nvidia driver was already extremely well-optimized and the use of DirectX 11 actually comes with small performance gains in many cases. Ashes of Singularity at "crazy" settings and 4K, for example, was a bit faster with DirectX 11 at 41.6 vs. 40.8 fps. We also measured a small performance advantage for DX 11 for Rise of the Tomb Raider. Hitman still produced graphics errors with the review driver 368.13 in DX12, so we waived a comparison (Nvidia says they are working on a fix until the launch). The theoretical potential of DirectX 12 is shown by the 3DMark 2013 Overhead Test. An 11x result speaks for itself.

The new video decoder was also convincing in our review. Both 2K H.264 as well as 4K H.264 playback was smooth at high frame rates and the CPU load was low (4K 100 Mbps 138 fps, 4% CPU). HEVC was no problem, either (1080p at 565 fps, 4% CPU and 4K 267 fps at 1% CPU).

Thanks to 12-bit HEVC decoding and new security features, the GTX 1080 is one of the first cards certified according to PlayReady 3.0 (SL3000) and can therefore be used for 4K streaming (e.g. Netflix) in Windows 10. More information about Pascal's video decoding and encoding is available in our in-depth analysis of Pascal.

After numerous benchmarks and measurements, we can congratulate Nvidia for Pascal with a clear conscience. The graphics card has a similar power consumption, but there is a significant performance jump. Even two GTX 980s SLI can be slightly beaten on average in the gaming benchmarks. The desktop 980Ti and Titan X are also beaten. Gaming in 4K with the GTX 1080 is usually possible at high settings. A notebook version is probably just a matter of time, similar to the GTX 980.

The high-quality Founders Edition from Nvidia convinces with convenient noise levels and high-quality materials. Only the future will tell if it can compete with third-party models. The price will probably be average, but more expensive cards will certainly be shipped with higher clocks.