NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Shoot-Out: ASUS Strix And Zotac AMP Extreme


GTX 1070 Ti Shoot-Out - Test System, Unigine Superposition, And VRMark

We tested the custom GTX 1070 Ti 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)

Zotac GeForce GTX 1070 Ti AMP Extreme Edition
ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1070 Ti
NVIDIA Founders Edition GTX 1070

16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4-2666
256GB Corsair Neutron Series XT SSD (system)
1TB Seagate External USB HDD (game/bench files)
Integrated Audio
Integrated Network
Relevant Software: 
Windows 10 Pro x64 (16299.248)
NVIDIA GeForce Drivers v390.77

Benchmarks Used:
Unigine 2 Superposition 1.0
3DMark "Fire Strike"
3DMark "Time Spy"
Futuremark VRMark
Rise Of The Tomb Raider
Middle-Earth: Shadow Of Mordor
Hitman 2016
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands

Here you will see just how the ASUS and Zotac GTX 1070 Ti custom cooled variants perform in relation to each other and NVIDIA's homegrown original GTX 1070. For this we use both synthetic benchmarks and an array of DX11, DX12 and VR game titles. Then its onto overclocking performance and power consumption before wrapping things up.

Unigine Superposition
Pseudo-DirectX / OpenGL Gaming

Superposition is a relatively new benchmark from Unigine, powered by the UNIGINE 2 Engine. It offers an array of benchmark modes, targeting gaming workloads as well as VR, with both DirectX and OpenGL code paths. There is an extreme hardware stability test built-in as well. Unigine Superposition uses the developer’s unique SSRTGI (Screen-Space Ray-Traced Global Illumination) dynamic lighting technology, along with high quality textures and models, to produce some stunning visuals. We ran Superposition in two modes using the DirectX code path – 1080p Extreme and VR Maximum -- to compare the performance of all graphics cards featured here.

unigine superposition
Unigine Superposition

superposition 1080p2

superposition 1080p score2

Both Zotac and ASUS put up great numbers here in our intial test run pulling away from the 1070 FE model by 4-5%. There is very little difference between the two custom cards in terms of performance. However, Zotac does take the official win.
superposition vr2

superposition vr score

Here in our first VR test, the results are much the same. We see both custom variants outpacing the GTX 1070 Founder Edition. Yet the cards again show very similar performance against each other, with Zotac eeking out another close win.

Futuremark VRMark
Testing Rift And Vive Readiness

Futuremark’s VRMark is designed to test a PC’s readiness for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets. The benchmark does not, however, require that one of the headsets is attached to the PC and it uses an in-house graphics engine and content to ensure comparable results between different platforms. We ran the "Orange Room" VRMark test at defaults settings here.

vr mark thumb
Futuremark VRMark

VRMark frames
VRMark score

It's more of the same here with Zotac taking a near 15% lead over the base 1070 FE. What this test also shows is that these custom GPUs make formidable VR solutions for gamers.

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