MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X 11G Review: Blazing-Fast And Custom Cooled

Name: MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X 11G
Brand: MSI

by Shawn Sanders — Friday, May 05, 2017, 12:28 PM EDT

MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X 11G - Test System, Unigine Heaven And Superposition Performance

Page 2: MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X 11G - Test System, Unigine Heaven And Superposition Performance

We tested the graphics cards in this article on a MSI Z270 XPOWER Gaming Titanium motherboard powered by an Intel Core i5-7600K quad-core processor and 16GB of Corsair Vengeance 2666MHz RAM sitting pretty atop a Thermaltake Core P3 SE Snow open-air chassis.

How We Configured Our Test Systems: 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 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 i5 Powered

Hardware Used:
Intel Core i5-7600K
(3.8+GHz, Quad-Core)
MSI Z270 XPOWER Gaming Titanium
(Intel Z270 Chipset)

Radeon R9 Fury X
GeForce GTX 1070
EVGA GTX 1080 FTW2 ICX
MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X 11G

16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4-2666
256GB Corsair Neutron Series XT SSD (system)
1TB Corsair Voyager Air USB 3.0 (game/bench files)
Integrated Audio
Integrated Network

Relevant Software:
Windows 10 Pro x64 (10586)
AMD Catalyst ReLive 17.4.3
NVIDIA GeForce Drivers v381.89

Benchmarks Used:
Unigine Heaven v4
Unigine 2 Superposition 1.0
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
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands
Gears of War 4
VR Score

Now lets jump right in. Here will illustrate just how the MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X performs in both synthetic benchmarks and a wide array of DX11, DX12 and VR game titles. Then we'll take a peak at power consumption and get into some overclocking before wrapping things up.

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

Heaven Bench FPS

Heaven Bench Score

The MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X 11G is the clear winner here with a very large 35% boost in performance over the top standard 1080 card from EVGA.

Unigine Superposition v1.0 Benchmark

DirectX 11 Extreme Performance & Stability Test

Powered by the company's Unigine 2 Engine, Superposition v1.0 is a brand new system-intensive benchmark from the folks who brought us Valley and Heaven bench. It is an extreme performance and stability benchmark featuring cutting-edge visual fidelity and SSRTGI (Screen-Space Ray-Traced Global Illumination) dynamic lighting technology. The bench can be run in both DirectX or OpenGL APIs and offers tests in VR, 4K and rich 8K resolutions.