GIGABYTE GTX 1080 Windforce 3X OC General Benchmarks
Compute can still be a good reason to buy a consumer GPU. They can provide a majority of the performance compared to their professional counterparts just with a few tradeoffs that may be acceptable for some use cases. They can offer a lot of good value that shouldn’t be dismissed for those amateur or budding developers looking for a compute card.
Caffe DNN
Here we’re testing Caffe, which isn’t quite FP16 yet, though is still a very viable test of compute capability. But just how much better is this going to be in comparison to it predecessors, or even with its rivals. Caffe DNN can easily be run by anyone on a *nix distribution. Simply download the applicable binaries, compile it with either cuDNN or use AMD’s open source OpenCL version, though AMD will be releasing a much more efficient version when Vega hits the streets. You can then test the benchmark that’s inherent in the Caffe framework.
Folding@Home Benchmark
Next up we’ll test the familiar, and updated, Folding@Home benchmark which is a test of single and double precision work. It’s a good benchmark that tests a specific workload, though it does give a nice ideaa of how it performs.
Monte Carlo Financial Simulation
SiSoft Sandra has a nice financial OpenCL compute test that runs through a Monte Carlo simulation of monetary futures. It is, again, a specific workload but it does give a great idea of how well the GTX 1070 FTW can do with potentially real-world scenarios.
The GTX 1080 won’t be winning double precision awards in the consumer guise, though it is a single precision powerhouse. Aside from the Pascal Titan X, it simply has no equal among consumer-oriented cards. Or for the price. That said, the GTX 1080, and any model such as this with a better aftermarket cooler, is great for a workstation. You might lack ECC VRAM, but it absolutely screams during anything single precision. And of course rendering in general is boosted quite a bit. The Windforce 3X OC isn’t magically faster, though it’s more competitive while being much cooler in the process. And quieter. Those last two points are vital for some workloads, because you probably don’t want a tornado, or furnace, next to you.