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With the GTX 1080 Ti, Nvidia has ushered in a new level of performance at a price point that doesn't include four numbers after the pound sign. The short of it is that you get slightly higher performance than a Titan X Pascal but rather than a £1,179 fee for the now discontinued card, the asking price for GTX 1080 Ti in its Founder's Edition form is £699. It's hard to argue with that kind of value for money if you require the type of GPU horsepower that 4K60 and 1440P high-refresh rate monitors demand.
As we have just eluded to, the GTX 1080 Ti joins Titan X Pascal by being a single-GPU graphics card that is truly capable of pushing a 60+ average frame rate at 4K. In seven of the eight games we test with, GTX 1080 Ti was pushing around 60 FPS or higher average frame rates while also typically leveraging the highest image quality presets available. Before now, that kind of liberty from a single graphics card would have had you staring the £1,179 Titan X Pascal in the face while listening to whining sounds emerging from your wallet.
Have your sights set on a brand new high-refresh rate 4K monitor when they start to emerge in the coming months? The graphics setup required to drive such frame rates at the 4K resolution just got a whole lot cheaper thanks to the GTX 1080 Ti. Save up a couple of extra hundred pounds and you can buy a pair of GTX 1080 Ti cards for SLI, which should deliver superb 4K high-refresh rate gaming performance when coupled with a fast CPU.
Nvidia shouted about a 35% performance increase over the GTX 1080 and those claims look to be true, based on our testing. They even seem a little conservative when looking at performance metrics for the higher-resolution 4K tests. Change the comparison to the fastest single-GPU cards from the last generation – AMD's R9 Fury X and Nvidia's GTX 980 Ti (which traded blows with Titan X Maxwell) – and performance improvements in the range of 70-90% are regularly observed for 4K gamers.
Despite being a relative bargain compared to the Titan X Pascal, for its ~35% performance increase over the GTX 1080, the GTX 1080 Ti commands a ~41% price increase over Nvidia's MSRP (49% over the cheapest models currently available). What this suggests is that Nvidia is charging a premium for the liberty of higher performance from a single-GPU configuration. I'll let you form your own opinion on that point as many people will see it as fair whereas some buyers may instead lean towards the SLI route with a pair of cheaper cards.
Overclocking delivered good gains. We pushed the GPU core to the point where it was sometimes tiptoeing around the 2GHz frequency level under load. Coupled with a 200MHz (0.4Gbps effective) increase to the GDDR5X VRAM, our overclocking efforts netted performance improvements of 9% in Rise of The Tomb Raider and 10% in Gears of War 4, both at 4K.
Power consumption is as expected from the 250W-rated graphics card. GTX 1080 Ti commanded around 27% more power than GTX 1080 in our gaming load test (though the number will be closer to 35% in other tests, based on the TDP). That's a fair compromise for the performance increase offered. Compared to last generation's gaming beasts – the GTX 980 Ti and R9 Fury X – power draw for the GTX 1080 Ti is roughly similar but its performance is at a whole different level.
The Founder's Edition cooler is OK. It isn't the best when it comes to temperatures or noise output but it is able to cool the 250W GPU with only a small performance loss due to thermal throttling. We expect to see coolers from board-partners offer better performance but they are also likely to command a higher price when they start to become available in April. Nevertheless, a ‘Performance Mode‘ switch in GeForce Experience that ramps up fan speed and power budget for higher performance and better cooling would be welcomed.
With a slightly cut-down GP102 GPU compared to Titan X Pascal and increased core and GDDR5X memory frequencies, the GTX 1080 Ti is able to take its place at the top of the graphics card food chain. Factor in the £480 reduction in cost against the Titan X Pascal and a realistic lack of alternatives at this price and performance level, and Nvidia's GTX 1080 Ti 11GB looks to be an excellent option for enthusiasts who have the gaming requirements to justify the best.
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Pros:
- £480 cheaper than Titan X Pascal and higher performance on average.
- Performance improvements of more than 30% against GTX 1080.
- Extremely impressive efficiency gains versus last generation's gaming beasts – the GTX 980 Ti and R9 Fury X.
- 11GB VRAM is plenty for 4K gamers and should suffice for 5K gaming.
- A true 4K60 graphics card.
- Compatibility is a strength for the cooler design – mini-ITX and SLI usage have been considered.
- Good overclocking gains.
Cons:
- Founder's Edition cooler causes thermal throttling by default.
- The Founder's Edition cooler is louder than some board partner designs.
- No passive fan mode under low load, like on many board partner designs.
KitGuru says: If you want the fastest single-GPU graphics card on the market, Nvidia's GTX 1080 Ti is just that. Better yet, its £699 price tag is £480 cheaper than the previous king.
Thanks for the review. In the concluding remarks you state “it should suffice for 5K usage”. Well, older cards also suffice for 5K usage, just not 5K gaming. I would be very grateful if you would expand on your thoughts in a meaningful way please? Why aren’t there any 5K gaming tests, there are 5K monitors for several years now. Yet powerful graphics cards are regularly tested with 1080p monitors, as if that means something to anybody?
1080p monitors are the most widely used by an enthusiast audience, and for those moving to a higher resolution 4k seems the way to go as a single card can now hold a 60fps minimum with high image quality settings. 5K would push the demand higher and its still very niche. I agree though, id like to see a few 5k tests just for shits and giggles.
Well, I would only partially agree, and with the more obvious part. These past ~2 years we have regularly seen 4K gaming tests although 4K60 was nowhere to be seen, for example. And if a technology is trying to break some barriers why not test it in quite an obvious way? 5K monitors are great for gaming, no lag, no 5000€ price etc.
Hmmm
Given that NVidia has had almost a year to come out with this “New” card, and given its still sky high price of $700 (700 bucks is only “cheap” to the people selling these cards..) it is an underwhelming release at best. And take a look at the 250 Watt power demand, which will surely surge past 300 watts when overclocked. How quickly the NVidia fan boys (and if the 10 reviews I have seen thus far are any indication, the online PC reviewer establishment as well) forget the endless whining and complaining about the R9290X power and heat performance. In this regard the 1080ti is a giant step backward.
So basically if you have a GTX1080 right now and are playing at 1080P there really isn’t any compelling reason to shell out $700 to get a 15% bump in performance. Not to mention you may have to upgrade your power supply and case cooling. And if you look at the performance delta in aggregate even at 1440 the cost/benefit isn’t stellar either.
These numbers look eerily similar to AMD’s Ryzen 7 gaming numbers. Things don’t get really interesting until you get to 4K. However, right now if 4k is where you play, this is best card on the market, at least until Vega shows up. But the fact remains that the 1080ti is nothing more than year old technology in the form of a cut down Titan. We really need AMD to hit Vega out of the park to get NVidia off its butt……
I’m an nvidia guy, I bleed green for sure now that the Shield TV is a thing. Back in the days of the 7970, I was all about AMD. We need Vega to be a hit, for nvidia fans and for amd, if it can compete with nvidias high end offerings, it will make competition between the two companies fierce, and in the world where consumer is king, that is a good thing.
Thank you for turning AA off in your 4k benchmarks which is something most sites don’t do. Annoying when they do benchmarks with things like MSAA on at 4k when it isn’t needed and you can’t get an accurate representation of real world 4k performance.
Could be worse, they could be telling you 20fps is all you need as its ‘super smooth’, as eteknix just did today in their GTX1080ti ‘CPU’ ‘editorial’. Biggest AMD shill piece on Ryzen I have ever read. last time I am going there!
Thanks for pointing that out. ‘Gaming’ was meant by the word ‘usage’, which has now been updated. With that said, multi-monitor 5K work can command a lot of VRAM too if you use programs such as Photoshop and Lightroom. I haven’t tested with a card other than the 6GB GTX 980 Ti, though, and I haven’t tested if it’s a case of Adobe simply caching data into the VRAM where there is spare capacity rather than a performance enhancement available.
Unfortunately, I had very little time to test this card due to shipping delays. So I wasn’t able to gather data for 5K gaming. Also, the limited appeal (to gamers) of the current handful of 5K monitors meant that it wasn’t a worthwhile compromise to sacrifice the gathering of other performance data in favour of 5K tests.
“AMD Graphics cards were benchmarked with the AMD Crimson Display Driver 16.11.4.”
Uhhhh, why were the AMD cards using drivers from 4 months ago?
I would imagine time is a problem as Luke already said in another post. There is quite a lot of work involved in these and I noticed he is also doing Ryzen reviews in the last 2 weeks as well. Guess the guy needs to sleep sometime. Anyone ever tell you, your avatar looks like a mafia don?
I’m sorry but that’s how nvidia is rolling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzSUzMGSMEQ
i dont see your 35% gain in some games the frame rate is 4 fps and some 15 to 20 frames that amounts
to 2 to 20% not the 35 you are saying
Ok Ok I have to admit it is a very fast card it just squeaks by as a good 4K gaming card which is pretty impressive. I still say they held onto the card for to long probably only because when I had the money to buy it they were thinking when the heck is AMD gonna release that Vega thing so we can start cashing in on Ti goodness…lol
No, no one ever did. Maybe because the ladies like this picture? Anyway, I turned out to be the darkest of the family, considering my brother is blond and my sister is blond with blue eyes. So considering I’ve been called Turkish before, being called south Italian is probably an improvement, since I’m Portuguese. And I look just like my father, except there’s a picture of him when he was 8 and blond, while I was never blond.
Umm it means something to me. I much prefer maxing out my games at 1080p 144hz+. So I’m thanking for 1080p benchmarks with super powerful cards.
Of course, but isn’t your 144Hz+ gaming limited by CPU? But yes, my post was over the top, no doubt, I wanted to make a point that we regularly read about Titan X, 10-core i7 CPUs and similar tech, with pleasure, because we’re enthusiasts. So even if I am not going to buy it because of its price/performance I like to see a review. 5K gaming on the other hand isn’t Martian Hyperdrive yet it is easily dismissed because it is not ‘enthusiast’, but ‘niche’, although there really is nothing wrong with high resolution, those are wonderful panels. However, Titan X or a 10-core Intel CPU are not regarded ‘niche’, they are ‘enthusiast’..by now you certainly get my point 🙂
Hi.
Which games are you referring to? The gains tend to be more
visible at higher resolutions (due to less CPU bottlenecking) and at 4K
are more than 30% in Deus Ex, GoW4, GTA V, Metro: LL, ROTTR, Witcher 3, and Total War: Warhammer.
The bulk of the data was gathered at that time, hence why the Nvidia cards (except GTX 1080 Ti, due to its later launch) also use a driver of the same period. We did some internal re-testing of the new Nvidia driver with the Titan X Pascal and found its performance changes to be relatively minor except in Ashes of the Singularity at 4K. So we decided that it was best to retain the older data for comparison as I wasn’t given enough time with the card to do full re-testing of a stack of GPUs.
AMD has been destroyed completely.
Ryzen is not good processor for gaming and they got no answer for Nvidia.
Total AMD failure!
I really do hope AMD Radeon are able to pull it out of the bag with the RX Vega later this year as from the limited releases we have seen so far it looks promising. Now if they can also replicate the same power savings they have achieved with their latest hardware then Intel AND Nvidia will seriously need to rethink their own tech and pricing structure. It will be a much needed boost to the Desktop market in my opinion.
sorry, a question and sorry for bad english, in the witcher it says AA (above), and above it says nothing about AA
I JUST SAW A REAL REVIEW on youtube that rated this card at real numbers and they are 21.5% from the 1080 not the lies about 35% they said you can get 35 from overclocking to the max no other way
stock speeds are 21.5 still good but not the lies that NVidia is saying
i hope so too but look at facts amd like to hype the razen is a failure at gaming i have one and overclocking no way i tried it crashes after 1 2 days on and when you reboot it says that overclocking has failed i hope its just a bios fix and my video encoding im seeing a 50%
slower then the 7700 kaby lake from what i know about amd this card will be 80% of a 1080
the 1080 ti is 21 to 35% faster then the 1080 i don’t see amd matching anywhere near this
the fury is 50% of the 1080 the most they can do i think will be 30 to 40% better that will be still slower then the 1080 im only guessing
I understand your frustration. IPC for the Ryzen chips is comparable to the Intel and OC aside I think they will and do provide great value for money in today’s market. The BIOS updates you mention will come thick and fast very soon improving stability and performance. Gaming is an issue for many but not the issue that media would have you believe as a very good FPS is still there especially in 4K. The problem we have at the moment is the vast majority of code is favouring the Intel platform and while updates will be forthcoming I trust that newer games will be able utilise the undisputed abilities of the Ryzen chips off the bat. Now as for RX Vega: AMD advertised 40% uplift on their CPUs and gave us 52% and IF the same were true for Vega then we are already on to a winner of a GPU. I also believe AMD have always given more “bang for your buck” so fingers crossed we shall see exactly that later this year.
Hi. The settings screenshots above The Witcher 3 charts show that AA is set to ‘on’ (the third screenshot). The ‘above’ text refers to the tested settings being shown in screenshots above the charts.
oh, yes, i didnt see them, thnx
is ur mobo made by asus?
I cant believe none of those cards can”t a maintain a minimum 60fps at 1080P at all times…