Pricing and Closing Thoughts
When the GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 launch,ed the GTX 970 was the immediate sweetheart of the deal, showing a value and aggressive price point that NVIDIA has (and continues to) shy away from. It appears that maybe that same mentality isn’t exactly creeping into the GeForce GTX 1070. As a reminder here are the base prices for the cards in our inter-generational, inter-vendor comparison.
- GeForce GTX 1070 8GB – $379
- GeForce GTX 1070 8GB Founders Edition – $449
- GeForce GTX 970 4GB – $329
- GeForce GTX 980 4GB – $499
- Radeon R9 Nano 4GB – $499
- Radeon R9 390X – $389
Let’s look at one of our new performance per dollar graphs to see how everything stacks up.
Remember, we have two listings for the GTX 1070 here; one at the expected MSRP of partner cards and one at the Founders Edition price that is $70 more expensive. Let’s discuss the easy results first. The GeForce GTX 980 is clearly a “bad deal” for a new GPU if the prices stay at the $499 price, which I don’t expect they will. The same is true for the Radeon R9 Nano, at $499 it doesn’t perform as well as the GTX 1070 so it takes a big hit here.
But look at the GeForce GTX 970 and the Radeon R9 390X – both of them are competitive with this value metric going against the new GTX 1070, and when you compare them to the Founder Edition price, both of them are actually equal "values" in a couple of instances! This was not the case with the GTX 1080 – the Fury X didn’t even come close to the value of the GTX 1080 in large part due to the large performance gap between the two cards.
Now, before I read comments complaining about this metric, you must understand that one single graph does not give us all the information needed to make a decision about a product. Our data above is looking at performance per dollar, but doesn’t give you RAW performance. If a card is half the price but half the performance, is that good? Also, power consumption, power efficiency and new technologies and features are not included in this data.
That doesn’t make it any less interesting though.
Performance Summary
The new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 is an amazingly fast graphics card for its placement, and yes, even for its price. In my testing across 7 different games, in both DX11 and DX12 titles, at 1920×1080 and 2560×1440, the GTX 1070 is faster than the GTX 980 Ti, a card that launched at $649 and was still selling for over $600 as I wrote the first draft of this review. Considering either the $379 or the $449 price point of the new GP104 option, depending on your desire for a Founders Edition or a partner card, the GTX 1070 will likely be faster than whatever you have in your system.
Comparing NVIDIA’s generational card jump, from the GTX 970 to the GTX 1070, the difference is substantial. The GTX 1070 based on Pascal is never less than 53% faster than the GTX 970 when running at 2560×1440 and is nearly twice the performance in Rise of the Tomb Raider! At 1080p the differences are minimized in a couple of cases, but for the most part, 1080p gaming for PC users is a “solved problem” and there are plenty of GPU options that can address it adequately. The 8GB of memory on the GTX 1070 should give it longer legs than either the GTX 970, GTX 980 or even the GTX 980 Ti as we push further into higher resolutions like 4K and VR head mounted displays.
Don’t forget that all of the performance advantages of Pascal that we talked about in our GTX 1080 review apply here including SMP capabilities like Single Pass Stereo and Lens Matched Shading. It is very possible that in the near term future Pascal’s advantages in VR performance will only grow through software adoption of this tech.
Closing Thoughts
Many of our readers were waiting on the results from GeForce GTX 1070 testing to decide which new NVIDIA product was going to be best for them. The GTX 1070 is more than $200 less expensive, if you are using the MSRP prices, and that is a significant amount that you could use to invest in your display, processor, storage or maybe an HTC Vive. In my experience with the new card, it is more than capable of running your 1080p or 2560×1440 display without a problem but for gamers serious about the move to 4K, the GTX 1080 performance advantage is likely going to be worth the cash. For everyone else, the GTX 1070 looks like the card to get, balancing performance, cost, power and features unlike any graphics card before it!
Availability questions for both the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 still keep me up at night; it’s only useful for me as a reviewer to recommend products, and at a specific price point, if you can actually get them at the time promised and for the price promised. If NVIDIA has shortages or resellers jack up prices like they did with the initial batches of G-Sync displays, then our opinions and suggestions can be modified.
We still have some questions of course, including the pending release of AMD’s Polaris architecture. It’s believed that they will target cards for $299 and under, which MIGHT make the comparison of Polaris 10 to the GTX 1070 unbalanced. But, it’s possible that AMD and the Radeon Technologies Group have a magical rabbit in a hat to pull out in June, and could undercut NVIDIA’s Pascal release with better performance and/or value. But are you willing to wait and find out? For gamers that want to game NOW and want to have an amazing experience doing so, the GeForce GTX 1070 is the card to buy.
Based on my observation of
Based on my observation of the GTX 970 and 980 releases, I have a feeling that the GTX 1070 will be the best value. And anyone who buys a GTX 1080 will regret it once the 1080 Ti’s releases. Personally I may end up getting just one 1080 just to try it out for gaming and folding@home, but I’m really eager to see what Nvidia brings to the table with the Titanium release.
The link on the “Testing
The link on the “Testing Suite and Methodology Update” page in this paragraph:
“For those of you that have never read about our Frame Rating capture-based performance analysis system, the following section is for you. If you have, feel free to jump straight into the benchmark action!!”
jumps to the 1080 review.
I was properly confused for a few seconds when I didn’t see any 1070 data on the page.
@Allyn: What would you think
@Allyn: What would you think about frame time weighted frame time percentile graphs? Like in the SSD reviews?
Just a joke, I don’t think it matters that much in this data since the variance is not multiple orders of magnitude here.
Ryan and I actually had this
Ryan and I actually had this conversation the other day. It could come into play with the percentile plots, but things would need to be presented a bit differently. It would help spread cards with greater variation out of the pack a bit more, but as it stands now, cards that misbehave tend to misbehave badly enough that we don't need to weigh it any differently to make it obvious.
These new power measurements
These new power measurements are amazing, thanks pcper for keeping on it, pushing measurement methods and supplying us with sensible data.
(however, I think the particular page mixes Hawaii, Fiji and Tahiti as others have also commented on)
“Testing suite” page:
>> As a
“Testing suite” page:
>> As a result, you’ll two sets of data in our benchmark pages
Word missing?
>> As a result, you’ll word
>> As a result, you’ll word missing two sets of data in our benchmark pages.
I know it’s already alot of
I know it’s already alot of work, but can we have some openCL or blender benchmarks? or even just from preimer pro testing
not all people game
and, well, also for the 1080 please! >.<
Using Chrome atm. When I
Using Chrome atm. When I click on a picture, the pictures tend to look a bit weird. Like, with the power graph when I click on it, the picture isn’t centered on the page. When I click on the bar graph, the picture is super large.
Would anyone be able to say
Would anyone be able to say if one could pair this GPU with a 980ti since they are comparable in performance and are pretty much the same architecture?
Unlikely nVidia would let you
Unlikely nVidia would let you do it. Might work in something like Ashes of the Singularity but betting other developers will do a similar version of multi-card rendering doesn’t seem like a sound plan.
Why single out power used by
Why single out power used by graphics card alone?
As long as GPUs need driver executed by CPU it does nor make sense to me.
Great review yet again Ryan.
Great review yet again Ryan. Just a heads up, the link to the benchmarks on page 3 sends one to the 1080 page.
Are the other cards used in
Are the other cards used in the comparison overclocked?
Why does this site still use
Why does this site still use the stupid tiny lines? Why can’t you just put the damn FPS numbers down and be done with it! I hate looking at very tiny lines just to get a idea of performance! This is a huge reason why I stopped coming to this site for reviews!
Ryan.. would you agree that
Ryan.. would you agree that nVidia probably made the 970 too good of a deal for what you got? As it seems there is more differences between the 1070 vs 1080 this time around.
If nVidia could change history, they probably would have either made the 970 not as fast or more expensive.
@Ryan Shrout, can u do
@Ryan Shrout, can u do another review regarding MICRON & SAMSUNG VRAM for GTX 1070 again?
there’s some fiasco like previous GTX 970 3.5GB VRAM & guess what now is bout the brand.
obviously, every reviewers cherry picked with SAMSUNG chip & how come there’s no MICRON chip for review??? thanks.