Hitman, CARS And Rise of the Tomb Raider Results
Hitman
AMD turns in another exceptional performance in Hitman; its Radeon R9 Fury X lands in second place after the GeForce GTX 1080, while the Fury technically scores third place (though the GTX 1070 achieves the same average frame rate). But again, Nvidia’s second-fastest GP104-based board is expected to sell for quite a bit less money.
We want to see Founders Edition cards on shelves at $449 before handing Nvidia any sort of endorsement. But if the company hits its target with availability, you can bet AMD will have to react.
The previous situation repeats itself at 4K; the R9 Fury edges out Nvidia’s 1070 by a hair.
This time it’s the Nvidia cards that get snagged by stuttering though, albeit mostly right at the beginning of our benchmark. The GeForce GTX 980 struggles with smoothness through the run, although its low average and minimum frame rates are probably more apparent to gamers.
Project CARS
Even AMD’s Radeon R9 390X offers better than 40 FPS at 2560x1440 with aggressive quality settings in Project CARS. But the GeForce family sweeps this title as even Nvidia’s GTX 980 beats AMD’s Fury X. GeForce GTX 1070 finishes in second place, behind the 1080 and ahead of GeForce GTX Titan X.
The spikes on our single frame time over average frame time chart look large, but the smoothness graph’s worst-case of ~7ms, and its average of closer to 1 to 2ms, assures us that you’re actually getting a fairly smooth experience.
Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1070 is more than 17% faster than the 980 Ti at Ultra HD—and the 980 Ti was already capable of serving up playable frame rates. Smoothness remains a strong point across the board in Project CARS, although the GeForce GTX 1080 does trip over itself during the last third of our benchmark run (evidenced by the spikes above 10ms that stand out like a sore thumb).
Rise of the Tomb Raider
If we were comparing the GeForce GTX 1070 to Nvidia’s previous-gen 970, the perceived gains would naturally be larger. But given the contenders at our disposal, we can tell you the 1070 is still a little more than 7% faster than GeForce GTX 980 Ti in Rise of the Tomb Raider with the game’s settings cranked up.
That advantage over the 980 Ti shrinks to just over 5% at 3840x2160. Then again, with minimum frame rates in the 20s, you’ll want to dial back the graphics detail for more playable performance anyway. Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1080 again proves itself to be the only single-GPU solution we’d want in a system tasked with 4K gaming at taxing quality settings.
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