With the venerable GeForce GTX 980 having celebrated its 0.33 birthday already, in the world of GPUs that places it squarely over the hill. To in addition confirm that notion, its successor, the GeForce GTX 1080 is over a 12 months old already and offers 60% greater overall performance. The overall performance bump on this final era become very massive and that is why the Pascal-based GTX 1080 stays the GPU to beat except cash is burning a hollow for your pocket.

Whether you're looking to upgrade from an older GPU or certainly recognize the statistical importance of the records supplied, this text have to give you a clear perspective of photographs cards performance spanning several years. This characteristic become a observe up to the 'Then and Now' article we posted shortly after the GTX 980's launch. We gathered then that during 5 years we had visible close to a 3x bump in images horsepower.

But with the discharge of the Pascal primarily based pics cards and the GTX 1080 which become the structure's flagship board, the time has come to revisit history and notice how six generations of Nvidia GeForce photos cards evaluate.

The table beneath shows the 8 GPUs that include our test. The listing consists of 4 principal Nvidia architectures launched between March 2010 and June 2016: Fermi (GTX 480 and GTX 580), Kepler (GTX 680 and GTX 780), Maxwell (GTX 980 and 980 Ti) and Pascal (GTX 1080).

GeForce GTX 480 GTX 580 GTX 680 GTX 780 GTX 780 Ti GTX 980 GTX 980 Ti GTX 1080
Codename GF100 GF100 GK104 GK110 GK110 GM204 GM200 GP104
Fab (nm) forty forty 28 28 28 28 28 16
Transistors (Billion) three 3 3.fifty four 7.08 7.08 five.2 eight.zero 7.2
Die size (mm2) 529 520 294 561 561 398 601 314
CUDA Cores 480 512 1536 2304 2880 2048 2816 2560
TAU 60 sixty four 128 192 240 128 176 one hundred sixty
ROP forty eight forty eight 32 48 forty eight sixty four ninety six sixty four
Memory (MB) 1536 1536 2048 3072 3072 4096 6144 8192
Bus width (bit) 384 384 256 384 384 256 384 256
Bandwidth (GB/s) 177.4 192.three 192.2 288.four 336.4 224 336 320
Release date Mar-10 Nov-10 Mar-12 May-thirteen Nov-thirteen Oct-14 Jun-15 Jun-sixteen
Price at launch $500 $500 $500 $650 $700 $550 $650 $600

Note: This function became in the beginning posted on 06/20/2016. We have revised it and bumped it because it's as relevant today because it become before. Part of our #ThrowbackThursday initiative.

The GTX 480, GTX 580 and GTX 680 had been simply the single-GPU flagships for his or her series, even as the GTX 780 turned into certainly an extension of the GTX six hundred range and while it landed it was 2nd handiest to the GTX Titan -- this card is excluded from this write-up because at $1,000, it became in a distinctive elegance and hardly ever made feel to the common gamer for the price.

Six months after the GTX 780 shipped we got a fair faster seven hundred series GPU, the GTX 780 Ti. This changed into followed almost a 12 months later by way of the GTX 980, and once more this main launch become ultimately followed through the faster 980 Ti variation together with the flagship Titan X.

It is worth mentioning that the GTX 1080 changed into handiest the start for the Pascal architecture. A quicker, more polished variant within the shape of the GTX 1080 Ti noticed the mild in March 2017, as reviewed right here. Other releases in the GeForce Pascal own family include the GT 1030, GTX 1050, 1050 Ti, 1060, 1060 3GB, GTX 1070 and the overkill Titan XP.

However as we've got finished in the beyond, to streamline testing we are sticking to flagship playing cards for their respective series and testing in DirectX 11 titles only, as supported by way of all GeForce collection, old and new, so we can appropriately evaluate them. Without further ado, allow the benchmarks start...

Test System Specs

  • Intel Core i7-6700K @ four.50 GHz (Skylake)
  • Asrock Z170 Z170 Extreme7+
  • g.skill TridentZ 8GB (2x8GB) DDR4-3000
  • Samsung SSD 850 Pro 2TB
  • Silverstone Strider Series ST1000-G Evolution
  • Nvidia GeForce Game Ready Driver 368.39
  • Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
  

Benchmarks: Crysis 3, BioShock, Tomb Raider

First up we have Crysis three and prefer maximum of the games featured in this newsletter this title is getting on a bit now at 3 years old. Even so, at 2560x1600 it still affords a challenge and with anti-aliasing disabled the GeForce GTX 1080 averaged just 68fps, although that made it 42% quicker than the 980 Ti.

It is loopy to appearance returned and see GPUs together with the GTX 480 averaging just 16fps on the equal decision, making the 1080 over four instances faster. What’s extra, the GTX 480 averaged 42fps at the lowly 1366x768 decision. Do word the GTX 480 became launched 3 years earlier than Crysis three, but the effects are nevertheless sudden.

BioShock Infinite isn’t almost as worrying as Crysis three and for that reason the GTX 1080 is able to average well over 100fps at 2560x1600, as did the 980 Ti. This time the GTX 1080 became handiest 23% faster than the GTX 980 Ti and fifty seven% quicker than the GTX 980. The GTX 1080 also remained over 4x faster than the vintage GTX 480.

When trying out with the popular Tomb Raider reboot the GTX 1080 averaged 122fps at 2560x1600, making it quite a bit faster than the GTX 980 Ti. Just as exciting is the truth that at this decision the GTX 1080 become 6x quicker than the GTX 480 and almost 5x quicker at 1366x768.