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

The Steam VR Performance Test measures a system's performance using a 2-minute sequence from Valve’s Aperture Robot Repair VR demo. After running the test, it determines whether your system is capable of properly running VR content at 90Hz and whether or not the visual fidelity can be increased to the recommended level for a given application. Both a system’s CPU and GPU are factored into the score.

Steam VR Performance Test

DirecX11 VR Performance

Steam VR Performance Test

The GeForce GTX 1080 put up the same score as the factory-overclocked GeForce GTX 980 Ti in the Steam VR Performance test. Note, however, that this benchmark doesn't benefit from the GTX 1080's simultaneous multi-projection technology, and also factors CPU performance into the mix. The bottom line is that the GeForce GTX 1080 is arguably the best, single-GPU powered graphics card for VR applications, though it isn't fully exploited in this test.

LuxMark v3.1

OpenCL Benchmark

LuxMark is a cross-platform, Open CL-accelerated 3D rendering benchmark. It's based on the open-source LuxRender physically-based spectral rendering engine, which accurately models the behavior of light and supports high dynamic range. LuxRender also features a number of material types to allow rendering of photo-realistic and artistic scenes. LuxRender is free software, licensed under the GPL, that offers plugins for packages like Blender, Maya, Cinema 4D and 3DS Max. We ran all three of the scenes included with the benchmark using the GPU rendering mode.

LuxMark

The GeForce GTX 1080 didn't perform quite as well as expected here. With its high clocks and 9TFlops of peak compute performance, it should have performed better here. We mentioned the results to NVIDIA and a bug report was submitted, but we don't have any additional information to share just yet. The GTX 1080 outran the Titan X in the most-taxing Hotel Lobby scene, but trailed otherwise.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, Gaming, graphics, GPU, (nasdaq:nvda), gtx 1080

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com