NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Review: Pascal For The Masses

Name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Sunday, May 29, 2016, 06:00 PM EDT

Shadow of Mordor And Thief Performance

Monolith’s surprisingly fun Orc-slaying title Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, delivers a ton of visual fidelity even at the lowest quality settings. So, to maximize the eye-candy on these high-end graphics cards, we ran the game’s Ultra quality benchmark routine at a couple of resolutions, topping out at 4K--excuse us, 3840x2160 for the sticklers out there.

All of the game's graphics-related options were enabled, along with FXAA and Camera Blur...

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor Performance

Glorious Orc-Slaying Vengeance

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

We saw more of the same in Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. In this game, the GeForce GTX 1070 outpaces the Titan X and Radeons once again, and trails only the 1080 and factory-overclocked ASUS STRIX 980 Ti.

There were some notable frametime variations on the GeForces here, but the framerates are high enough that the variations are not perceptible in real-world gameplay.

Thief

DirectX 11 Gaming Performance

Square Enix set the tone for Thief by saying, "Garrett, the Master Thief, steps out of the shadows into the City. In this treacherous place, where the Baron’s Watch spreads a rising tide of fear and oppression, his skills are the only things he can trust. Even the most cautious citizens and their best-guarded possessions are not safe from his reach."

The Thief series has been popular for years, not only for its interesting story lines and unique gameplay, but because the games have consistently featured excellent graphics and imagery and leveraged bleeding edge technology, like AMD's Mantle API, for example.

thief screenshot
Thief

theif 1070 1

theif 1070 2

The performance trend we've seen up to this point continued, with one notable exception. In Thief, the 1070 beat out the Titan X at both resolutions, but the Fury X ended up being faster at 4K.

The GeForce GTX 1070's frametimes are relatively smooth here as well, save for one big spike at the beginning. The Radeon exhibited a number of perceptible spikes in this game, however.