Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 review - Introduction

GeForce GTX 1070
The New Price VS Performance GPU Benchmarked - Tested - Reviewed

On May 17^th Nvidia rolled out the GeForce GTX 1080, the new flagship graphics card. Alongside of that product release Nvidia silently announced the GeForce GTX 1070 as well. However the specs release have been rather limited. Today however we can post and host the review of the reference card (these days called founders edition). Though from a visual perspective the two cards might look identical, there are a number changes alright. In this review we'll talk you through it all.

It’s been a long time coming, but the day is finally here! The two major desktop dedicated GPU manufacturers both are close slash ready for the newest GPUs. It’s been a time long coming and not without reason. The graphics card industry, or the GPU industry has been on hold, waiting for a smaller GPU fabrication process to become viable. Last generation GPUs were based on a 28 nm fabrication, an intermediate move to 20 nm was supposed to be the answer for today’s GPUs, but it was a problematic technology. Aside from some smaller ASICs the 20 nm node has been a fail. Therefore the industry had to wait until an ever newer and smaller fabrication process was available in order to shrink the die which allows for less voltage usage in the chips, less transistor gate leakage and, obviously, more transistors in a GPU. The answer was to be found in the recent 14/15/16 nm fabrication processors and processes with the now all too familiar FinFET + VLSI technology (basically wings on a transistor). Intel has been using it for a while, and now both Nvidia and AMD are moving towards such nodes as well. Nvidia is the first to announce their new products based on a TSMC 16 nm process fab by introducing Pascal GPU architecture, named after the mathematician much like Kepler, Maxwell and Fermi. 

Pascal is here and today the reviews in that 2^nd product based on the GP104 GPU is released, the GeForce GTX 1070.

GeForce GTX 1070

• 16 nm GP104 silicon "GP104-200-A1" GPU
• 1920 CUDA cores
• 15 out of 20 streaming multiprocessors enabled
• 120 TMUs
• 64 ROPs
• 256-bit GDDR5 memory, 8 GB standard memory amount
• Maximum GPU Boost frequency ~1,700 MHz
• 6.45 TFLOP/s single-precision floating point performance
• 150 W TDP, single 8-pin PCIe power connector
• 3x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x HDMI 2.0b

The GeForce GTX 1070 is all about that Pascal GP104 GPU, yet for obvious reasons had to be slowed down a bit. The GeForce GTX 1070 might have the same GP104 GPU housed on it's PCB as the 1080, however it is a cut-down version of the GPU as Nvidia stripped away some segments. Where the GeForce GTX 1080 has 2560 shader processors, the GeForce GTX 1070 has 1920 shader processors. This means it is has 15 out of the 20 SMs active (15 streaming multi-processors x 128 shader cores). In order of magnitude, the secondary biggest change is the memory type being "regular GDDR5" memory and not the new and hip GDDR5X. That memory is clocked at 2,000 MHz which is 8 GHz (GDDR5-effective) at a memory bandwidth of 256 GB/s.

The two differences are responsible for a performance drop from 9 TFLOP/s Single-precision floating point performance for the GeForce GTX 1080 towards 6.45 TFLOP/s for the GeForce GTX 1070. So yeah that would still be at least 2/3 of it's potential. But that does show in price as this card will start selling at 379 USD with the founders edition (reference card) costing 449 USD.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition