GTX 1080 Ti Performance and overclocking
How we test
We’ve run all three of these cards on the open test bench that consists of the following components.
- Motherboard: Asus Z170-Deluxe
- Processor: Intel Core i5-6600K (Overclocked to 4.8GHz)
- RAM: Corsair Vengeance 2666MHz, 16GB DDR4
- Cooler: Corsair H60 liquid cooler
- PSU: Corsair CX750M
- SSD: Samsung 850 EVO
- OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
I’ve run the numbers against the GTX 1080 and the Titan X, all with the very latest March 2017 drivers to give each GPU the fairest crack of the whip.
The games were run at their maximum settings with a healthy dose of anti-aliasing. Some might find the addition of AA controversial, but you’ll always get the best comparisons when pushing cards right to their very limits. I also ran each game at 5K, although here I’ll focus on the 4K results since this is what most people will be expecting.
GTX 1080 Ti – Performance and Benchmarks
(average fps)
To make the most of the 1080 Ti, we’ve added some benchmarks that represent a couple of more recent games to ensure it’s pushed to its limits. We start with a hit from last year.
Battlefield 1
DICE’s World War I epic is a great benchmark for high-end GPUs thanks to incredible detail, particle effects and GPU-sapping textures. I ran it at 4K and at 5K, although realistically most people will be maxing out at 4K for the time being.
Battlefield 1 doesn’t have a repeatable built-in benchmark, so the test is run during the on-rails section of the mission “Mud and Blood”.
The GTX 1080 Ti managed an average frame rate of 72fps, which is superb when you consider I’d turned everything to Ultra and whacked up anti-aliasing as well. Tweaking the graphics settings that aren’t as important to you will yield even better results.
Related: Best gaming PC specs to build yourself
Compared to the GTX 1080, which managed 55fps in the same test, the 1080 Ti is 24% faster.
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
It’s almost time to retire Shadow of Mordor from our benchmarking suite.
2014’s adventure epic has an excellent built-in benchmark, but with sequel Shadow of War coming soon, the 1080 Ti benchmark is perhaps its last hurrah.
At 4K and Ultra settings, 86.6fps is another good result, with no noticeable dips in frame rate during the test. Surprisingly for such an old title, Shadow of Mordor was a huge outlier in my tests, generating a 1080 Ti score that was 44% faster than the regular GTX 1080.
Rise of the Tomb-Raider
One of the toughest tests at high resolutions, Tomb Raider’s beautiful benchmark was where the 1080 Ti came closest to nudging the sub-60fps barrier, with an average score of 61.5fps at maximum settings in 4K. This was 20% faster than the GTX 1080, which is a notable and noticeable improvement.
Drop a few graphics settings, including shadows and anti-aliasing, and you’ll have 70fps plus in Tomb Raider without any issues.
Hitman
Hitman released its final set of missions last year, but it still has a resource-hogging benchmark that really tests the mettle of GPUs.
In 4K, the GTX 1080 Ti managed an impressive 73.6fps at maximum settings, maintaining a relatively stable frame rate throughout the run. It wasn’t significantly faster than the GTX 1080, though, which put in an average frame rate of 59fps.
GTX 1080 Ti vs 1080
(average fps)
GTX 1080 Ti vs 980 Ti
I didn’t have a 980 Ti test with the latest drivers, but our benchmark results from last year point to 1080 Ti performance that’s between 30% and 50% faster at 4K in Hitman, Tomb Raider and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.
GTX 1080 Ti vs Titan X
(average fps)
It was the comparison Nvidia made when it launched the 1080 Ti – and it is indeed faster for £300 less. If you own a Titan X, it isn’t exactly a tragedy; you’ve had world-beating performance for a full seven months, so think of it as a Titan Xclusive. Obviously, you’ve no need to upgrade.
GTX 1080 Ti – Overclocking, Heat and Power Consumption
The GTX 1080 Ti is a much more powerful beast than the GTX 1080, and considerably more so than the 980 Ti.
Its TDP (thermal design power) is rated at 250W, the same as the 980 Ti and Titan X, while the GTX 1080 clocks in at just 180W. This could be all the difference for those with builds that have 500W power supplies.
Indeed, peak power draw for the entire TrustedReviews test system without overclocks was 412W, compared to the GTX 1080’s 340W in the same test. If you have a more powerful processor than the one we used, take a look at your power consumption readings to check you won’t over-stretch your PC’s power supply.
Running the Unigine Heaven benchmark on a loop in 4K, the GTX 1080 Ti was able to boost well beyond its stated 1,600MHz clock speed, happily sitting at around 1,800MHz at around 84oC.
Overclocking is as easy as ever, with the GTX 1080 Ti receptive to around 1,950MHz. I was quickly able to get a stable looping Unigine benchmark at 1,950MHz without the GPU throttling back. Temperatures maxed out at around 86oC on the automatic fan profile; I’d probably tweak it so it runs a little louder and cooler.
Popping the fan speeds up to 70% reduced the temperature to a more comfortable 77oC.
It will be interesting to see whether third-party card manufacturers can encourage the 1080 Ti beyond 2GHz and what sort of cooling will be required in order to achieve such performance.
Memory overclocking was nice and easy: the 11GB of 11GHz GDDR5X memory was happy to receive a boost up to 11.8GHz without instability kicking in.
Nvidia says it has improved the fan design to run slightly quieter, but I didn’t hear a difference – and neither could my decibel meter. At 28,000rpm, both fans put out between 55 and 56dBA of noise, which is perfectly acceptable. In a compact, poorly insulated case with overclocks applied, it will likely become louder, but not significantly.
Should I buy the GTX 1080 Ti?
Buying the most expensive graphics card you can afford has long been a reviewer’s’ trope, but it’s almost always true. The 1080 Ti stretches this advice to its very limits with its super-high price, but with no competition from AMD at this end of the market, Nvidia has reached new performance territory.
When buying a 1080 Ti, don’t think about the Titan X – for what it offers, it’s rather overpriced at this point – but think more about the GTX 1080. With the 1080’s big price drop to £500, it’s become the new de facto choice for 4K gaming at High settings.
However, with 3GB more memory and at least 20% better performance, it’s hard not to recommend the 1080 Ti for those building the best system they possibly can for 4K and multi-screen gaming.
If you’re thinking about a direct upgrade from the 980 Ti, the performance increase is substantial; the 1080 Ti is up to twice as fast. If you have a 1080, your card has a lot of life left in it and it’s probably wise to stick with it for now.
Related: Best graphics card
If you don’t have a 4K monitor and don’t plan on buying one, the 1080 Ti is overkill – and even if you have a 1080 Ti but don’t always find yourself playing the very latest AAA games, you can save a couple of hundred quid on a 1080 or more on a 1070.
Verdict
A new performance benchmark – but you pay for it.
Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti review: the numbers are in. Hail to the 4K king
The Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti is the current fastest GeForce GPU, and your best hope for genuine gaming performance as a 4K graphics card. It’s well over a year old now, but it’s still the king. Of course there’s always the ultra expensive Titan cards, but they cost stupid money. Well, all the cards have been stupidly expensive while the cryptocurrency market was breaking our tech-buying hearts… but at least graphics card prices are starting to settle down a little.
But the GTX 1080 Ti is the final piece of the puzzle with regards to the Pascal generation of GeForce GPUs, and fits in the sizable gap between the GTX 1080 and the Titan Xp.
It’s also going to remain the fastest GeForce card on the market until Nvidia gets around to translating the currently compute-based Nvidia Volta architecture down to the desktop level later this year.
Exactly when that happens we’re still not sure, but even once the new cards do land around August/September time, the GTX 1080 Ti is still going to remain an outstanding GPU.
It looks like the new mainstream gaming GPUs will be at least unveiled around August 20 this year, as Nvidia’s Hot Chips and pre-Gamescom events will happen that day on either side of the Atlantic. It still hasn’t stated the name or the architecture yet, so they could still be called either GTX 2080 or GTX 1180, but we’re still betting on them essentially running on the Nvidia Volta tech.
Though maybe the new cards will come rocking a newly-minted Nvidia Turing architecture, or maybe Nvidia Ampere… Right now there is more speculation over the naming of the next-gen GeForce cards than there is any hard fact.
Or soft fact. Right now, I’d take soft fact.
Whatever, the powerful, efficient Pascal architecture has had a good run though, and the GTX 1080 Ti is absolutely the best of the gaming lot.
Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti specs
As possibly the final grand hurrah of the Pascal architecture (we’re refusing to count the bizarre GTX 1070 Ti) the GTX 1080 Ti is a very familiar card, made even more so by its striking resemblance to the Titan X. We had originally expected Nvidia to follow its previous Titan>Ti form by chopping a few chunks of logic out of the big chip to squeeze it down into a more price-friendly, consumer-focused form. Not a bit of it…
Nvidia has pretty much just rebadged the original Titan X and nearly halved its price. To that end the GTX 1080 Ti is rocking the same 16nm FinFET GP102 GPU with 12 billion transistors and the same 3,584 CUDA cores inside it.
| GTX 1080 Ti | GTX Titan X | GTX 1080 | |
| GPU | GP102 | GP102 | GP104 |
| Lithography | 16nm FinFET | 16nm FinFET | 16nm FinFET |
| Transistors | 12bn | 12bn | 7. 2bn |
| Chip size | 471mm2 | 471mm2 | 314mm2 |
| Boost clock | 1,582MHz | 1,531MHz | 1,733MHz |
| Base clock | 1,480MHz | 1,417MHz | 1,607MHz |
| CUDA cores | 3,584 | 3,584 | 2,560 |
| Memory Capacity | 11GB GDDR5X | 12GB GDDR5X | 8GB GDDR5X |
| Memory bus | 352-bit | 384-bit | 256-bit |
| TDP | 250W | 250W | 180W |
| Launch price | $699 (£699) | $1,200 (£1,179) | $529 (£423) |
Those cores are arrayed across 28 streaming microprocessors (SMs) in six graphics processing clusters. The full core configuration, though, is ever so slightly different from the Titan X. Despite having the same 3,584 cores and 224 texture units, Nvidia has cut the number of render output units (ROPs) to 88, down from 96.
It’s also made a slight incision into the cache and removed a small amount of that too – the L2 cache on the Titan X stands at 3,072K, while the GTX 1080 Ti has 2,816K of L2.
Things are most different on the memory side, though the important spec change isn’t actually the drop from 12GB to 11GB of GDDR5X. Working with memory maestro, Micron, Nvidia has dropped the fastest high-capacity graphics memory around onto the GTX 1080 Ti’s PCB. This new iteration of GDDR5X memory has a standard operating frequency of 5,505MHz and an 11Gbps data rate. That means despite actually having less memory, and thus a smaller aggregated memory bus (352-bit instead of the Titan X’s 384-bit), the GTX 1080 Ti comes with a total memory bandwidth of 484GB/s. That may only be 4GB/s faster than the Titan X, but that’s still impressive.
Nvidia has also boosted the cooling and power componentry surrounding the beefy GP102 GPU that forms the beating heart of the GTX 1080 Ti. The new seven-phase dual-FET design spreads the power load more than the Titan X and allows for less power leakage (realised in GPU terms as heat) and a cleaner supply of juice.
This is partly how Nvidia has been able to ship the standard GTX 1080 Ti cards with a higher out-of-the-box boost clock than the Titan X.
The Founders Edition cooler features a new vapour chamber and an overall design which Nvidia claims offers twice the airflow area the GTX 1080’s Founders Edition has. The extra exhaust area needed to boost the airflow does mean there’s no DVI connection on the card’s I/O plate, though.
Nvidia does supply a DisplayPort to DVI adapter however, for those who can’t give up their old-school monitors. I’ve still got a lovely 30-inch IPS Dell screen that needs a DVI connection so I can totally sympathise…
Interestingly, though, despite the extra power and cooling engineering efforts, the thermal threshold of the chip has actually been lowered from its Titan X days. The Titan X will only start throttling its chip when the silicon tops 94°C, while the GTX 1080 Ti will start reining in its GPU at 91°C.
Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti benchmarks
PCGamesN Test Rig: Intel Core i7 8700K, Asus ROG Strix Z370-F Gaming, 16GB Crucial Ballistix DDR4, Corsair HX1200i,
Philips BDM3275
Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti performance
So there it is, in orange and blue: the GTX 1080 Ti is faster in-game than Pascal’s Titan X. It’s only ever by a couple of frames per second on average at most, but the fact there is a performance delta leaning towards the newer, cheaper card at all is deeply impressive.
It ought to go without saying, then, that means it also gives the GTX 1080 a powerful shoeing in the gaming performance stakes too. Nvidia has been calling this the best Ti card it’s ever produced for the fact it estimates a 35% performance boost over the GTX 1080 with the new GTX 1080 Ti, but in our testing that’s looking like a rather conservative statement.
At times, especially at 4K, we’ve been seeing performance well over 50% higher using the GTX 1080 Ti.
The price difference between the two cards then does genuinely offer a serious frame rate upgrade for the money, giving a clear delineation between Nvidia’s top two consumer-focused GPUs. If you’re sticking with a 1440p monitor the GTX 1080 will see you right, but if your focus is fixed firmly on 4K screens – or above – then the GTX 1080 Ti is the only card you need to consider right now.
While there isn’t much of a difference in the gaming performance of the GTX 1080 Ti and the Titan X, there does seem to be in the overall power draw. We measured the maximum platform power draw from the wall during intensive 3D testing and the GTX 1080 Ti seemed a good bit more thirsty than the Titan X. Given the higher GPU clockspeeds and the increased memory frequency though that’s probably not surprising. When you’ve got a chip as big and complex as the GP102 GPU the power draw increases dramatically as you push it harder and harder.
That’s evident in our overclocking testing too.
At our peak GPU and memory frequencies both the GTX 1080 Ti and Titan X push well over the 400W peak. Sadly, though, I was unable to get either GP102 chips above the 2GHz overclocking mark Jen-Hsun Huang had been showing off on stage at the GDC unveiling of the GTX 1080 Ti.
Still, hitting a GPU offset of +150MHz and +190MHz for the Ti and Titan X respectively isn’t bad and meant both cards were generally (because of frequency/power variance) running at around 1,911MHz in-game.
On the memory side, the GTX 1080 Ti’s newly-minted Micron GDDR5X memory is capable of being pushed a lot further than that of the Titan X. I was still able to coax the older card’s memory up above the 11Gbps mark, but on the Ti I almost hit 12Gbps. Despite that, with both cards running at their maximum overclock, the Titan X actually maintained the very slightest performance lead over the GTX 1080 Ti.
This is where the GTX 1080 Ti’s new cooler comes into play, though. The Titan X gets incredibly blowy once you start cranking up the clocks, while the GTX 1080 Ti is noticeably quieter.
It’s definitely not actuallyquiet though, when you get above 50% fan speed you will certainly know about it. We’ll be looking to the board partners and their bespoke cooling arrays to change that.
Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti verdict
For all the little details of this review, the cache, GPU, and memory differences, all you need to know is Nvidia has created a graphics card with all the power of its flagship Titan X for almost half the price. So yeah, for all your 4K needs look no further. Shouldn’t have really bothered writing all that other stuff, should I? This could’ve just been a 140 character Twitter review…
There is still the fact that, while in comparison with the $1,200 Titan X the GTX 1080 Ti looks like a bargain, we’re still talking about a consumer-focused graphics card that costs $870(£669). That’s a huge amount of money, and just because the professional-level Titan X has been priced at that point it doesn’t mean we ought to accept that high-end graphics cards aimed at the consumer market should cost the best part of a grand.
Kudos to Nvidia though for finally giving up on the Pascal generation’s reference card/Founders Edition pricing shenanigans. But we’re still going to see some seriously expensive GTX 1080 Ti cards in the coming months.
The straight GTX 1080’s price drop, however, makes that a far more tempting GPU for anyone not yet looking to make the move to 4K. At 1440p and 1080p the GTX 1080 is more than enough GPU for even the most discerning of gamers. Even at 4K it manages some pretty healthy frame rates, especially if you’re smart with your graphics and post-processing settings.
But what of the Titan X? The GTX 1080 Ti is like a giant silicon middle-finger to anyone who dropped the cash on a Titan X, but also leaves the suddenly irrelevant card dead in the water. There’s simply no point, no benefit, to picking the Titan X over the Ti. And that’s a first; the Ti cards have always been mighty close to their Titan compatriots, but have generally maintained a slight lead, even if just in their extended frame buffer.
Which is why Nvidia subsequently released the Titan Xp a short while after the GTX 1080 Ti launch fuss had died down. As predicted, it uses the full GP102 core Nvidia fitted out their top Quadro cards with.
For most of us, the GTX 1080 Ti remains the best high-end 4K graphics card around. It’s still priced beyond the reach of normal gamers, but if your wallet is fat and you’re aiming for the highest resolutions in gaming then this is the GPU for you. Hell, you can pick up two of them for only slightly more than you might spend on a brand new Titan Xp.
Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti
Nothing else save a $1,200 Titan X can come close to the incredible performance of the GTX 1080 Ti. It’s still an offensively expensive graphics card, but it’s absolutely your best bet for serious 4K gaming performance.
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MSI PCI-E GTX 1080 Ti GAMING X 11G nVidia GeForce GTX 1080Ti 11264Mb 352bit GDDR5X from Video Cards catalog
Description
MSI
Series: GAMING X
Model: GTX 1080 Ti GAMING X 11G
Hardware Type: Gaming Graphics Card
Graphics Card Lighting: MSI Custom LED Lighting, Customizable Logo Lighting (16.8M Colors)
Memory Bandwidth: 484Gb/s
API Support: DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.5
Length: 275mm
Technologies: DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution), GPU Boost (Dynamic Processor Clock Variation), MFAA (Multi-Frame Anti-Aliasing), NVIDIA G-SYNC (Smooth Frame Output), NVIDIA PhysX-ready (use a weaker graphics card as a secondary GPU), NVIDIA Ansel (create professional-quality game photos), NVIDIA GameStream-Ready (ability to stream gameplay to mobile devices), NVIDIA SLI® Ready (ability to combine multiple graphics cards to increase performance)
Video
Maximum screen resolution: 7680 x 4320 @60Hz when connected to 2x DisplayPort
SLI support: Card aggregation possible using SLI 2 way
Video card configuration
GPU: GeForce® GTX 1080 Ti
GPU specifications
GPU clock: 1683 MHz maximum in GPU Boost mode, 1569 MHz base (OC mode), up to 1657 MHz in GPU Boost mode, 1544 MHz base (Gaming mode), up to 1582 MHz in GPU Boost mode (Silent mode)
Number of shader processors: 3584
Video memory: 11 GB
Video memory type: GDDR5X
Video memory bus width: 352 bits
Video memory frequency: 2781 MHz (11.
