Preliminary review: GeForce GTX 1080 2-way SLI

I'm confused: How do I get almost the same performance in BF4 with 980SLI, ultra 1440p dx11, as 1080SLI at the same settings / resolution? Is SLI not supported in Frostbyte all of a sudden?

 

As Hilbert pointed out, the price/performance ratio for 1080 is just ridiculous. That x2 and with uncertainty of multi-gpu sscaling is worse... better wait for 1080Ti if you want to go all out.

I guess 2x1070s would be kind of appealing... if you could find any that is. I would settle for 1 though.

 

Those are some weird and low numbers for such a powerful setup

 

Could you please test in 3440x1440 for the next round of test..?? so few sites actually test that resolution but there are more and more of those screens available

thanks

 

The results are not too bad but they can improve over time if the drivers and game devs permit it.

Also I think 1 1080 is enough for any kind of gaming above 1080p from the results that I have seen. But 2 1070 maybe a different story.

 

I would think, as per the last 30 years, we should wait for all aftermarket cards, drivers and such to be flushed out and tested, by consumers, before we draw any definite conclusions. Thank you.

 

HH, what's the ETA on other AIB custom card reviews? I'm interested to see the STRIX and the G1 especially. I'm guessing the Xtreme Gamer will launch a little later

 

Was wondering the exact same thing see above. Really weird.

 

Thank you Hilbert for this SLI review, I've had SLI for many years and with two EVGA OC 780's I will be upgrading my 3XS system with two 1080's so this prelimiary SLI article most interesting.
I'm going to wait for the MSI Z overclocked 1080 or another brand with a similar level of overclock & better coolers and then get the cards & a 4K G Synch monitor to replace my Dell U2711 which I've had for a while now.
Finally we have a viable framewise but still expensive graphics card solution to playing the latest games on high quality settings on a 4K monitor.

 

Good review, thanks Hilbert. Great performance, but I'm through with having reference cards due to the noise and heat. The fact it's £100 more is just an insult, really. Can't beat my Sapphire Fury for silence, can't hear it at all, even under full load.

 

Great preliminary analysis Hilbert, thanks. I look forward to some comparisons with crossfire in the coming months.

I was about to put some cash down on a new 1080, but I think I will save some pennies and go for a 2nd user GTX970 and utilize SLI at my current architecture level.

Again thanks. Keep up the great work on the site.

 

Excellent thanks a lot

I actually managed to secure a preorder for the G1 at Amazon for $611 (plus $120 for shipping and import fees into my country, which is still a heck of a lot cheaper than it goes for locally), not sure if they made a mistake or something. Now I'm just hoping they ship it within the next week.

It may have a single 8 pin connector, but I don't do extreme overclocking and most of the cards hit a brick wall just before 2.1ghz anyway

 

These are indeed very weird results. It seems 1080SLI scaling has a problem at lower resolutions (1080p/1440p) yet at 4K, scales very well. Will be interesting to see how things go with the next driver.

FYI - i'm running 2x 1080's in SLI + i7 6850K + 32GB Kingston HyperX Savage 2400mhz. I am not overclocking any of those components at the moment and i managed to get 24,379 in Firestrike and 16,468 in Firestrike Extreme and 9050 in Firestrike Ultra. So even though my 6850K is running at 3.6ghz while ur 5960X is running at 4.4ghz, i still managed a higher result, Hilbert. Very strange indeed.

Spoiler

 

Thanks for the review, and yes, should be alot better when newer drivers are out, from here on out, the performance of the card's in general wether sli or not will continue to improve, it will just get better from here on out, so it will take sometime,

 

I imagine the CPU is going to start becoming a huge bottleneck at 1080/1440p. In fact there are probably going to start being areas where it's a bottleneck even at 4K.

When the Ti and Vega come out, the scaling is going be all over the place.