Testing the Mighty EVGA GTX 1070 FTW
This GPU is a much lauded upgrade from the previous generation, the ACX 3.0 supposed to be able to provide a massive upgrade in cooling power over their Maxwell cards. They’ve also been infected by the dreaded LED disease and have added their own interpretation of how they should be attached to a GPU. But how does it perform? Those LEDs don’t give extra horsepower, though they can be used to tell you if it’s hot. But what kind of extra performance can be possibly find with the slight, but significant, overclock featured here.
Test System
- Intel Core i7-6700K
- Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 7
- 32GB Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR4 2666
- 512GB Samsung 950 Pro
- SanDisk Extreme Pro 960GB
- Enermax Platimax 1350
- Windows 10 64-bit
- NVIDIA Drivers: 375.70
- AMD Drivers 16.10.3
- PresentMON
Ashes of the Singularity
With the latest update to Ashes of the Singularity we see that the GTX 1070 FTW does indeed perform well. It maintains it’s lead over the Maxwell-based Titan X and even proves to be somewhat playable at 4K. Remember, this is a worst case scenario, so the benchmark really hammers GPUs. During normal play you’ll be hard pressed to not at least be somewhat satisfied at 4K. VRM’s reached 95-degrees.
Battlefield 1
Battlefield 1, a much updated version of Frostbite and in a much different setting than usual. Typically it’s been very well optimized and shows a linear scaling with compute resources nearly equally. It’s also now a DX12 showcase, as it was with Mantle, so we test solely in DX12. The FTW is faster than the Fury X, which has enjoyed driver updates that increase performance and generally great asynchronous compute performance, but certainly shows that the FTW is actually quite capable even at 4K. The higher frequencies are very much appreciated by Frostbite here, and it makes it much more capable. VRM’s never go above 92-degrees.
The Division
The Division, despite a very rocky initial release, has matured into a great game. That and the engine, Snowdrop, is far more optimized than it ever was.
DOOM
Once the Vulkan patch was released, DOOM became a high performer for AMD GPUs. It made great use of using both the compute and render pipeline and really shined with those GPUs that can do async well. Pascal can take advantage of that though we see a much lower advantage. EVGA’s GTX 1070 FTW does still stay near the top, however, and maintains the lead over the older Titan X throughout each resolution. Again, it’s possible to enjoy 4K, though it won’t be terribly quick, its’s till playable. 1070 FTW is very capable here. VRM’s reached 90-degrees.
Hitman
We’re working solely in DX12 with this, so it stands to reason that Fiji and even Hawaii will perform very well compared to the GTX 1070 FTW despite it’s increased clocks. It holds quite the lead until we get to 4K. Despite the higher amount of VRAM, it just can’t compete with a more efficient use of asynchronous compute. It’s faster than the Maxwell Titan X. VRM’s reached up to 91-degrees.
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Tomb Raider is still quite the beautiful and intense game, and perfect as a benchmark. For this we’re using the built-in benchmark, running DirectX 12. The 1070 FTW is near the top for all three resolutions that we test, certainly above the Titan X, which is marvelous considering the price difference when comparing at-release prices. At 4K the 1070 FTW is actually playable due to the fact that Rise of the Tomb Raider doesn’t necessarily require faster frame rates to be enjoyable. VRM’s never went over 90-degrees.