With the venerable GeForce GTX 980 having celebrated its tertiary birthday already, inorthward the world of GPUs that puts it squarely over the colina. To further confirm that notion, its successor, the GeForce GTX 1080 is over a year old already and offers 60% more than operation. The performance bump in this last generation was very significant and that is why the Pascal-based GTX 1080 remains the GPU to beat unless money is burning a hole in your pocket.

Whether you are looking to upgrade from an older GPU or simply appreciate the statistical significance of the information presented, this article should give you a clear perspective of graphics cards performance spanning several years. This characteristic was a follow up to the 'Then and At present' article we published shortly after the GTX 980's release. We gathered then that in 5 years we had seen close to a 3x crash-land in graphics horsepower.

Only with the release of the Pascal based graphics cards and the GTX 1080 which was the architecture's flagship board, the time has come up to revisit history and meet how six generations of Nvidia GeForce graphics cards compare.

The table below shows the 8 GPUs that comprise our test. The list includes four major Nvidia architectures released between March 2022 and June 2022: Fermi (GTX 480 and GTX 580), Kepler (GTX 680 and GTX 780), Maxwell (GTX 980 and 980 Ti) and Pascal (GTX 1080).

GeForce GTX 480 GTX 580 GTX 680 GTX 780 GTX 780 Ti GTX 980 GTX 980 Ti GTX 1080
Codename GF100 GF100 GK104 GK110 GK110 GM204 GM200 GP104
Fab (nm) 40 forty 28 28 28 28 28 xvi
Transistors (Billion) three 3 3.54 7.08 seven.08 5.2 8.0 7.2
Dice size (mm2) 529 520 294 561 561 398 601 314
CUDA Cores 480 512 1536 2304 2880 2048 2816 2560
TAU 60 64 128 192 240 128 176 160
ROP 48 48 32 48 48 64 96 64
Retention (MB) 1536 1536 2048 3072 3072 4096 6144 8192
Bus width (bit) 384 384 256 384 384 256 384 256
Bandwidth (GB/s) 177.four 192.3 192.two 288.4 336.4 224 336 320
Release date Mar-x November-x Mar-12 May-xiii Nov-13 Oct-14 Jun-15 Jun-16
Price at release $500 $500 $500 $650 $700 $550 $650 $600

Notation: This feature was originally published on 06/20/2016. We have revised it and bumped it because it's every bit relevant today as it was before. Function of our #ThrowbackThursday initiative.

The GTX 480, GTX 580 and GTX 680 were clearly the single-GPU flagships for their series, while the GTX 780 was truly an extension of the GTX 600 range and when it landed it was second only to the GTX Titan -- this carte du jour is excluded from this write-upwards because at $1,000, it was in a different class and hardly made sense to the average gamer for the price.

Six months after the GTX 780 shipped we got an fifty-fifty faster 700 serial GPU, the GTX 780 Ti. This was followed virtually a year later by the GTX 980, and over again this major release was somewhen accompanied by the faster 980 Ti variant along with the flagship Titan X.

It is worth pointing out that the GTX 1080 was only the commencement for the Pascal architecture. A faster, more polished variant in the form of the GTX 1080 Ti saw the calorie-free in March 2022, as reviewed here. Other releases in the GeForce Pascal family include the GT 1030, GTX 1050, 1050 Ti, 1060, 1060 3GB, GTX 1070 and the overkill Titan XP.

Yet every bit we've done in the past, to streamline testing we are sticking to flagship cards for their respective serial and testing in DirectX xi titles only, as supported past all GeForce series, erstwhile and new, so we can accurately compare them. Without farther ado, let the benchmarks brainstorm...

Exam System Specs

  • Intel Core i7-6700K @ 4.50 GHz (Skylake)
  • Asrock Z170 Z170 Extreme7+
  • M.Skill TridentZ 8GB (2x8GB) DDR4-3000
  • Samsung SSD 850 Pro 2TB
  • Silverstone Strider Series ST1000-G Evolution
  • Nvidia GeForce Game Ready Driver 368.39
  • Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

Benchmarks: Crysis iii, BioShock, Tomb Raider

First upwardly nosotros accept Crysis iii and like about of the games featured in this article this title is getting on a bit now at three years old. Fifty-fifty so, at 2560x1600 it still presents a challenge and with anti-aliasing disabled the GeForce GTX 1080 averaged just 68fps, though that made it 42% faster than the 980 Ti.

It is crazy to look back and encounter GPUs such as the GTX 480 averaging merely 16fps at the same resolution, making the 1080 over four times faster. What's more, the GTX 480 averaged 42fps at the lowly 1366x768 resolution. Practise note the GTX 480 was released 3 years before Crysis three, merely the results are nonetheless surprising.

BioShock Infinite isn't well-nigh every bit enervating equally Crysis three and for that reason the GTX 1080 is able to average well over 100fps at 2560x1600, every bit did the 980 Ti. This fourth dimension the GTX 1080 was only 23% faster than the GTX 980 Ti and 57% faster than the GTX 980. The GTX 1080 also remained over 4x faster than the one-time GTX 480.

When testing with the popular Tomb Raider reboot the GTX 1080 averaged 122fps at 2560x1600, making it quite a bit faster than the GTX 980 Ti. Just as interesting is the fact that at this resolution the GTX 1080 was 6x faster than the GTX 480 and well-nigh 5x faster at 1366x768.