EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 GAMING Review: Dialing-In On Performance

Name: EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 GAMING
Brand: EVGA

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, May 11, 2017, 12:00 PM EDT

EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 - Test System, Unigine And Fire Strike Benchmarks

Page 2: EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 - Test System, Unigine And Fire Strike Benchmarks

How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the graphics cards in this article on a Gigabyte X99 Gaming 5P motherboard powered by an Intel Core i7-6900K octal-core processor and 32GB of G.SKILL DDR4 RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" settings and disable any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The memory's X.M.P. profile was enabled to ensure optimal memory performance and the solid state drive was then formatted and Windows 10 Professional x64 was installed and fully updated. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers, games, and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.

HotHardware's Test System

Intel Core i7 Powered

Hardware Used:
Intel Core i7-6900K
(3.2+GHz, Octa-Core)
Gigabyte X99 Gaming 5P
(Intel X99 Chipset)

Radeon R9 Fury X
GeForce GTX 1080
GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
NVIDIA Titan X (Pascal)
Gigabyte Aorus GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

32GB G/SKILL DDR4-3200
OCZ Vertex 4
Integrated Audio
Integrated Network

Relevant Software:
Windows 10 Pro x64 (10586)
AMD Catalyst ReLive 17.3.1
NVIDIA GeForce Drivers v381.65

Benchmarks Used:
Unigine Heaven v4
3DMark "Fire Strike"
3DMark "Time Spy"
Rise Of The Tomb Raider
Middle-Earth: Shadow Of Mordor
Ashes Of The Singularity
Hitman 2016
Tom Clancy's The Division
VR Score

Unigine Heaven v4.0 Benchmark

Pseudo-DirectX 11 Gaming

Unigine's Heaven Benchmark v4.0 is built around the Unigine game engine. Unigine is a cross-platform, real-time 3D engine, with support for DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11 and OpenGL. The Heaven benchmark -- when run in DX11 mode -- makes comprehensive use of tessellation technology and advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion). It also features volumetric cumulonimbus clouds generated by a physically accurate algorithm and a dynamic sky with light scattering.

Unigine Heaven

heav1

heav2

The EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 with iCX technology drops in just behind the tri-slot, higher-clocked Gigabyte Auorus card here, but well ahead of the NVIDIA Founder's Edition.

Futuremark 3DMark Fire Strike

Synthetic DirectX Gaming

3DMark Fire Strike has multiple benchmark modes: Normal mode runs at 1920x1080, Extreme mode targets 2560x1440, and Ultra mode runs at a 4K resolution. GPU target frame buffer utilization for normal mode is 1GB and the benchmark uses tessellation, ambient occlusion, volume illumination, and a medium-quality depth of field filter. The more taxing Extreme mode targets 1.5GB of frame buffer memory and increases detail levels across the board. Ultra mode is explicitly designed for high-end and CrossFire / SLI systems and cranks up the quality even further. GT 1 focuses on geometry and illumination, with over 100 shadow casting spot lights, 140 non-shadow casting point lights, and 3.9 million vertices calculated for tessellation per frame. And 80 million pixels are processed per frame. GT2 emphasizes particles and GPU simulations.

3DMark Fire Strike

The performance trend was the same in 3DMark Fire Strike; the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 fished just behind the Gigabyte card, but comfortably ahead of the Founder's Edition.