Doom, GTA V & Hitman
Doom (Vulkan)
Use of the same benchmark sequence and quality settings allows us to compare the new results in today’s story and older data from our Nvidia Titan X Pascal 12GB Review. Why does this matter? At a recent workshop for members of the press, Nvidia made it a point to mention performance improvements tied to DirectX 12- and Vulkan-based games.
Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1080 Ti slips past the Titan X (Pascal), turning in a result that’s 30% faster than GeForce GTX 1080 and more than 76% quicker than the 980 Ti.
More to the point of the preceding paragraph, Titan X is almost 12% faster than when we first reviewed it. In the meantime, we did upgrade our test bed to a Core i7-7700K (from a -6700K), so let’s look at the 4K results, which further deemphasize platform performance.
The Titan X is now 14% faster than it was last August, so it does appear Nvidia exacted positive changes, either through its driver or via cooperation with id. GeForce GTX 1080 Ti similarly benefits from these improvements and is once again faster than Titan X (Pascal).
A more resource-laden GPU allows the 1080 Ti to outperform Nvidia’s vanilla 1080 by 34%. It’s a full 88% faster than last generation’s GeForce GTX 980 Ti. And although a higher resolution helps AMD’s Radeon R9 Fury X beat both the GeForce GTX 980 Ti and 1070, 1080 Ti is still 68% faster than the Fiji-based flagship.
Fortunately, all of the cards are fast enough at 4K to deliver what our unevenness index considers to be acceptable playability.
Grand Theft Auto V (DX11)
Our Grand Theft Auto V benchmark is made more demanding by the use of 4xMSAA (instead of 2x) and 4x Reflection MSAA (rather than Off). The rest of the settings are still maximized to whatever extent is possible.
This time around, Nvidia’s Titan X (Pascal) lands in the lead by a few frames per second. Still, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is more than 26% faster than the 1080, and 65% quicker than an older 980 Ti.
As we’ve seen over the past year, DirectX 12 tends to paint AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture in a favorable light. Radeon cards typically don’t fare as well in DirectX 11-based titles, though. Consequently, GeForce GTX 1080 Ti establishes its largest lead yet (89%) over the Radeon R9 Fury X in GTA V, the first DX11 game we’ve encountered.
The new GeForce’s advantage over AMD’s flagship grows to 95% at 3840x2160, where Nvidia’s top two cards are playable and the Radeon is not.
A higher resolution helps the 1080 Ti hop out ahead of Titan X (Pascal), extending the card’s lead over GeForce GTX 1080 to almost 36%.
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Hitman (DX12)
The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti matches the Titan X in our Hitman benchmark, and turns in an average frame rate just 14% faster than 1080.
Our unevenness index shows all six contenders delivering fairly smooth performance, even under the Ultra level of detail setting. So let’s move on to 4K testing for a more taxing workload.
A more graphics-bound task allows the 1080 Ti’s higher clock rate to exert an advantage over Titan X. At the same time, the 1080 Ti’s lead over GeForce GTX 1080 grows to 30%.
All of the cards in today’s line-up serve up playable frame rates, more or less. But the top-end 1080 Ti is more than 81% faster than last generation’s 980 Ti. Particularly at 4K, that’s a big difference.
