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Updated: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 8GB Pascal Review

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The Division And The Witcher 3 Results

The Division

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From our GeForce GTX 1080 review, “AMD and Nvidia are evenly matched in The Division. The GeForce GTX Titan X paces AMD’s Radeon R9 Fury X exactly, both edging out the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, which in turn shows up just ahead of the Radeon R9 Fury. Consider all of those cards playable.” Of course, the GTX 1080 stood above all.

The GeForce GTX 1070 distinguishes itself by breaking up the parity a bit, landing between GeForce GTX Titan X and 1080. There are a couple of smoothness interruptions at 2560x1440, but they're not severe.

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AMD’s Radeon R9 390X especially struggles with smoothness in The Division at 4K, but really, all of these cards are forced to cope with low minimum frame rates at one point in the benchmark. GeForce GTX 1080 appears to be your one viable single-GPU option for playing this game at 3840x2160 with its details cranked up.

The Witcher 3

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Our GeForce GTX 1080 review showed Nvidia’s 1080, Titan X and 980 Ti averaging right around 60 FPS, with the Radeon R9 Fury X cresting 58 FPS due to our frame rate cap. Enough readers asked for us to lift this, though, so we re-ran all of our numbers to see how they’d shake out.

Everything from the Fury X and up jumps over the 60 FPS barrier. When we fold in the GeForce GTX 1070’s results, we get Titan X-equivalent performance. Both the 1070 and Titan X are a little more than 13% quicker than AMD’s flagship Fiji-based board.

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Uncapping Witcher 3’s frame rate is inconsequential at 3840x2160. Even the mighty GeForce GTX 1080 averages less than 50 FPS. Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1070 does work its way into second place, though only barely, and with a lower minimum frame rate than the Titan X. Meanwhile, the Radeon R9 Fury X shows up in fourth, besting the GeForce GTX 980 Ti.

We already mentioned that AMD has some work to do on its pricing in a world with available GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 cards. In fact, Nvidia’s going to have to make some adjustments, too. Those GM200-based boards going for $600 and higher simply aren’t going to fly with Founders Edition GeForce GTX 1070s selling for $449.


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Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini is an Editor Emeritus at Tom's Hardware US. He edits hardware reviews and covers high-profile CPU and GPU launches.
62 Comments Comment from the forums
  • adamovera
    Archived comments are found here: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3073584/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1070-8gb-pascal-performance-review.html
    Reply
  • gromann
    Fury X is going for $399-449 as of yesterday on Newegg.
    Reply
  • nitrium
    So given the simultaneously lower price and higher performance of the partner boards, only an actual idiot would buy the "Founder's Edition" GTX 1070?
    Reply
  • George Phillips
    I feel that I should regret getting MSI 1070 FE. MSI's custom designs perform superior then FE cards in every way. Very impressive. Asus and Gigabyte's custom designs must also do better than FE cards.
    Reply
  • Krushe
    When you're talking about the heat on FE cards. I think the default fan speed is 45-50% at 83c. Make it 80% and the card never reaches 70c even with boost clock up to 1900+. What speeds are the MSI fans running at during your temp measurements?
    Reply
  • DookieDraws
    Edit: The article has been updated, so I deleted my original comment about the MSI GPU.
    Reply
  • Tony Casagrande
    "This means that the lowest possible GPU Boost clock rate step gets eliminated from the bottom of the BIOS’ table. So, if you want an additional space at the top, you need to make room for it by getting rid of the very bottom one."

    If it were me, I would have removed a low to middle clock rate instead of the very lowest to get both the low idle power consumption and the OC speed.
    Reply
  • straatkat
    Still annoyed that they posted this review without including the 970 as a baseline.
    Reply
  • neblogai
    Regarding the possible audible noise because of power spikes on PEG: it is not really about cheap MB, but about using analog audio out of MB, and not anything digital, right?
    Also, about overclocking: I think reviews of all these new generation nVidia and AMD cards should include average clock that cards operated when doing all game benchmarks. Official boost clock numbers are a bit useless, because AMD cards run games at below boost clocks, and average for nVidia GTX1070 is above boost clocks. Having just official boost clock numbers make it difficult to evaluate overclocking potential and make real gains look much bigger or smaller than expected.
    Reply
  • Calculatron
    Am I the only one that noticed that the Founder's Edition cards managed to pull over 75 watts from the motherboard PCIe slot and that no one went bonkers over it?
    Reply