Gadgetory

excellent on may 6th Nvidia announced two new graphics cards the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 and even though they only shared limited information with the public the tech world has spent the last couple weeks drooling and speculating over the new GPUs Nvidia made some bold claims including that both cards are faster than a Titan X but one claim in particular stuck with me with the new 1080 is faster than two previous generation gtx 980 s and sli since my water-cooled computer back there uses this exact configuration I took it as a challenge perhaps even an insult by Nvidia so I'm here today to set the record straight is the 1080 faster than 2 980 s and sli actually I don't care about that normal 980 SR for poor people is the 1080 faster than the Arctic Panther let's find out so since this video is also my GT X 1080 review I'm going to cover four main topics first is going to be a recap of what we learned from the launch event a couple weeks back second will be a summary of some of the new specs and technologies that we're now allowed to talk about there will be some benchmarks of course and fourth some quick overclocking so what we already knew about the GTX 1080 was this it will cost $600 MSRP or $700 if you get the founders Edition it uses the 60 nanometers 7.2 billion transistor Pascal based GP 104 GPU and has eight gigs of gddr5 X memory has a base clock of 1607 megahertz and a boost of 17 34 and NVIDIA demoed and overclocked card at their event running at 2.1 gigahertz it that was pretty impressive it has 2560 cuda cores a 180 watts thermal design power and a newly designed air cooler on the founders Edition that I have here it's got a similar look to the previous gen referenced cards but now it features more triangles my launch video I also went over Ansel and videos endgame picture-taking software VR works audio for more realistic positional audio and VR and simultaneous multipe rejection which is built into the hardware of the 1080 and 1070 it uses virtual viewports to more accurately and efficiently render multi monitor configurations VR games and other unique types of displays now let's move on to the new technologies I'm actually kind of surprised you haven't skipped ahead to the benchmarks yet so thanks for sticking with me since you're still here let's take a closer look at this particular founders Edition 10 the new cooler has a die cast aluminum body and a low-profile backplate half that backplate can be removed to provide more airflow and multi-card setups functionally it's the same as the 980ti cooler it's got a blower style fan it's got an aluminum thinner Rea over a vapor chamber that keeps the GPU memory and everything down there cool just a single 8 pin PCI Express graphics power connector is required and you can power up to 4 displays via the video outs you get 3 DisplayPort 1.2 ports that Nvidia says are forward compatible with DisplayPort 1.3 and 1.4 you get one HDMI 2.0 B and one dual link DVI I note that there are no analog analog connections on this card at all new display connection standards allow you to take advantage of the 1080s 12 bit display controller and handle 4k resolution at 60 Hertz for HP VC encoding and decoding HD VC is h.265 by the way it's effectively the successor to h.264 and DisplayPort 1.4 by the way also includes HDR metadata transport for connecting to new HDR displays and not that you have an 8k display but Pascal does also support that 76 80 by 4320 maximum resolution at 60 Hertz although that does require two DisplayPort 1.3 connections anyway let's move on to some of the more abstract things that NVIDIA has done to wring as much possible performance out of the 1080 as possible memory compression that's like taking a lot of data and making it smaller basically right so now NVIDIA features four to one and eight to one compression methods to reduce the number of bytes of data that have to be fetched from the memory to render each frame that's pretty cool asynchronous compute that was actually asked about a lot after the original announcement so if you consider a GPUs workloads there's the graphics processing and then there's other stuff like GPU based physics post-processing of rendered frames and asynchronous time warp that's part of VR rendering it checks your heads position at the last possible moment before it spits out the final frame Pascal's dynamic load-balancing allows the GPU to reallocate its resources on the fly to handle time critical asynchronous workloads or to simply use all of the GPUs idle resources they've also introduced something called thread level preemption and pixel level preemption which allows the GPU to essentially hit pause on whatever it's working on even the middle of rasterizing a single polygon for example and switch tasks in less than 100 microseconds to handle a time-critical asynchronous task finally there's simultaneous multi-project single pass stereo and lens matched shading all of which i discussed a launch event video that I already did so go watch that if you want more info and that's I'm not going to rehash it here let's just say they all make VR a better experience anyway though it's time for benchmarks at last everything here is going to be run at 4k and it will be including numbers for the GT X 1080 of course as well as a gtx 980ti and the AMD radeon fury x reference cards these were all run in an open testbed that's right back there except of course the arc panther that's 2-way gtx 980 s it's enclosed and water cooled and overclocked to about 15 45 for GPU the testbed is an Intel Core i7 59 and 30k CPU at 4.4 gigahertz 16 gigs of g.skill ripjaws 426 66 speed ddr4 memory and EVGA x99 classified motherboard and a HyperX savage 240 gig SSD enjoy clearly the arctic Panther winds end of story I'm not going to mention the gta5 score world we're all done here okay all right fine let's let's try another game that doesn't scale quite as well and that will also let us take a look at some DirectX 12 performance since that's something other people also asked for rise of the Tomb Raider so I won't attempt to explain the differences between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 here but it's safe to say the DirectX 12 is not yet the magic bullet that will just give you free game performance the few games that support it still show poorer performance than DirectX 11 for now but we'll hopefully see optimization on the software and driver side that changes that later this year so I'm sure people are already mad that I didn't overclock the 1080 even though my 9 80s are pretty heavily juiced so here's a quick look at the beta version of EVGA precision x16 for overclocking 810 80 you still get your options to adjust power target temperature target and GPU and memory clock offsets there's voltage control - but GPUs GPU boost 3.0 is the most exciting thing here in my opinion consider if you will that every GPU is a little different even one 1080 versus another 1080 but every GPU has a maximum theoretical frequency that it could hit at any given voltage without any issues GPU boost 2.0 would start off with a given voltage in frequency and then ramp both of those up in a linear fashion until it hits a threshold such as a temperature limit for example GPU boost 3.0 allows you to create a custom voltage frequency curve with a different frequency setting for each voltage point so you can maximize your performance even included an OC scanner utility which will run through a stress test for you to automatically set up a custom voltage frequency curve specific to your GPU automatically unfortunately it didn't work that great for me it kept locking up but again we're working with the beta utility right now so we got to give them a little little buggle room there I was still able to overclock the old fashioned way though and I pushed my GT X 1080 initially up to over 2.1 gigahertz but then settle back to a more comfortable 2,000 85 mega this gave the 1080 about a 500-point boost and firestrike ultra impressive for sure but still not enough to beat the arctic pant but did I mention that in all of these benchmarks the testbed with the GT X 1080 only pulled about 305 watts maximum from the wall socket closest competitor was the 980 TI which pulled about 370 and the fury X which pulled about 400 and finally the Arctic Panther at 670 watts but it's a full system in water cooling and dual GPU and all that stuff but anyway clearly the 1080 is absolutely awesome as it can kick all that ass and do it while consuming less power before I conclude though let's talk about this sli situation that has so many jimmies rustled out there first of all yes there is a new high bandwidth SLI bridge and it's only made for two-way configurations standard bridges will still work but they're only recommended for resolutions up to 2560 by 1440 at 60 Hertz rigid SLI bridges that have LEDs built into them that already exists will work up to 4k and then a video software will also tell you what kind of bridge if the text that you're using more to the point though three-way and four-way SLI are still going to be there but you will have to take some extra steps to enable it by running an Nvidia app to detect and generate a signature for your GPUs request an enthusiast key from a website that Nvidia will be setting up and then install the key to unlock the three-way and four-way functions does this mean the three-way and four-way SLI can things will be going away probably not does it mean that in video will be less obligated to support them I kind of think so but consider that DirectX 12 and VR introduced some interesting new multi-gpu options such as using it using a single GPU for each eye and VR or display adapter modes allows you to pool the memory from both GPUs and videos choice was to focus more on developing these configurations since three-way and four-way SLI are very very rare setups you guys are free to continue arguing about this now since I'm sure there are two sides of the story and you guys might have opinions one way or the other but at least now you really know what's going on that is all for this review though guys if you enjoyed it I strongly encourage you to hit the like button down there and of course if you want to help support me even more you can use my amazon link which is down in the description click it before you shop for stuff in Amazon that helps me a lot also feel free to visit my store stored-up also NetWare you can pick up shirts like this one also mugs and pint glasses subscribe to my channel if you're not already for more tech videos and as always thank you for watching the closest competitor that was the 1980 I doing about 370 watts fury X did about 400 watts arctic panther pulled about 670 but you know two