NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Review: A Look At 4K & Ultrawide Gaming

Futuremark 3DMark

I don’t like to overdo “time demos”, but I do love running some hands-off benchmarks that you at home can run as well (provided you have a license) so that you can accurately compare your performance to ours. It goes without saying that any synthetic testing would have to include Futuremark, and in particular for high-end cards, 3DMark’s Fire Strike test.

3DMark includes a number of different game tests, but today’s graphics cards are so powerful, the Fire Strike test is really the only one that makes sense. At 1080p, even modest GPUs can deliver decent performance. A great thing about Fire Strike is that the official tests encompass three different resolutions, including 4K, making it perfect for our testing.

With two GTX 1080 Ti’s in SLI, that magical 10K Ultra score could just happen. Based on these results, the GTX 1080 Ti is about 29% faster than the GTX 1080, which is fairly close to the 20% projected based on each card’s single-precision performance (10.6 TFLOPS vs. 8.8 TFLOPS).

Unigine Heaven

It’s hard to tell at this point if Heaven is ever going to see a new update, as it’s been quite a while since the last one, but what we have today is still a fantastic benchmark to run. That’s thanks to the fact that it’s free, an also because it can still prove so demanding on today’s highest-end GPUs. It’s also a great test for tessellation performance, as it lets you increase or decrease its intensity. For testing, I stick with ‘Normal’ tessellation.

Unigine’s Heaven exhibits even greater gains than seen in 3DMark, although I can’t help but feel like driver improvements have helped boost this delta a bit.

Catzilla

Meow hear this: there’s a new benchmark in town that promises to be purrfect for testing 4K resolutions. So, that’s just what I’ve used it for. The test consists of a cat innocently roaming a street until chaos ensues. Before long, this feline is mowing down buildings with its laser eyes, destroying GPU performance at the same time.

Wouldn’t ya meow it? The GTX 1080 Ti bursts right on past the GTX 1080, and comes oh-so-close to 10K. It seems likely with a little driver polish, 10K will be a cinch on this GPU.