NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Performance Review: Pascal, The New King

Name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, May 17, 2016, 09:00 AM 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 eye candy 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 games 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

At this point, we're starting to sound like a broken record, but the numbers are what they are. Once again, the GeForce GTX 1080 outpaced all of the other cards at both resolutions. It's lead over the Titan X opens up to about 24% here at the higher resolution, and pushed the framerate well into playable territory.

NVIDIA's latest drivers, however, caused some frametime variations in this game, that aren't present with the Radeon cards. The GeForces' framerates are so high though, 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 gtx 1080 1

theif gtx 1080 2

Hey, look at that! The GeForce GTX 1080 outperformed every other card we tested, yet again, at both resolutions. Its lead isn't massive over the next-best performing card -- the factory-overclocked 980 Ti -- but the GTX 1080 is fastest nonetheless. The GTX 1080 beats the Fury X by about 23% and the Titan X by 25% at the higher resolution.

The GeForce GTX 1080's frametimes are smooth as silk here as well. The Radeon exhibited a number of perceptible spikes in this game, but the GeForces were consistent throughout the entire run, save for a single blip at the very beginning.