Nvidia promises to provide yet another powerful graphics card to the PC enthusiasts and gamers with their new 10 series cards, for our review, we will be testing the GTX 1070. Running on the Pascal architecture, it was said that the 1070 can outperform the Titan X and 980 Ti cards but with a more affordable price tag.  Being the powerful card next to the GTX 1080, can this convince you to make the big upgrade? We’ll find out on our review.

Here are the specs for the Geforce GTX 1070:

GPU Engine Specs:

• NVIDIA CUDA® Cores: 1920
• Base Clock (MHz): 1506
• Boost Clock (MHz): 1683

Memory Specs:

• Memory Speed: 8 Gbps
• Standard Memory Config: 8 GB GDDR5
• Memory Interface Width: 256-bit
• Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec): 256

Technology Support:

• Simultaneous Multi-Projection: Yes
• VR Ready: Yes
• NVIDIA Ansel: Yes
• NVIDIA SLI® Ready: Yes – SLI HB Bridge Supported
• NVIDIA G-SYNC™-Ready: Yes
• NVIDIA GameStream™-Ready: Yes
• NVIDIA GPU Boost™: 3.0
• Microsoft DirectX: 12 API with feature level 12_1
• Vulkan API: Yes
• OpenGL: 4.5
• Bus Support: PCIe 3.0
• OS Certification: Windows 7-101, Linux, FreeBSDx86

Display Support:

• Maximum Digital Resolution: 7680×4320@60Hz
• Standard Display Connectors: DP 1.43, HDMI 2.0b, Dual Link-DVI
• Multi Monitor: Yes
• HDCP: 2.2

What is Pascal?

Named after the 17^th Century French Mathematician, the Pascal is the latest microarchitecture for the Geforce 10 series and the successor to the Maxwell architecture. It added new features to its new line of graphic cards to provide better performance to gaming and other graphic applications. These include GPU Boost 3, GDDR5 and GDDR5X support, 4^th generation Delta Color Compression, Dynamic load balancing scheduling system and CUDA Compute Capability 6.0 and 6.1. This also provides support to DirectX 12 where future games will be using, and even better performance for VR games and devices.

A Deeper Look

Looking at the specs of the GTX 1070, it shows to have more CUDA cores compared with the GTX 970 and 980 and a higher base core clock from the rest of the Maxwell cards. In terms of memory, both the GTX 1070 and 1080 have 8GB or memory, but the 1080 uses a faster GDDR5X though the 1070 can still perform well since it also have 8GB of memory and can still handle games on 4K resolution.

As for the appearance, the Founder’s Edition uses the same design from the GTX 1080 that gives out a multifaceted look and a full aluminum body to show that it is one of best in the line. The single blower fan setup can still a decent ventilation for the card. As for power consumption, the 1070 can run with rigs having 500 watt power supplies and unlike the 1080 that requires two 8-pin PCI power connectors, the 1070 only requires one 8-pin connector.

Just like with the other high-end Nvidia cards, the 1070 comes with a black backplate to protect the back portion of the card from dust and it also has a nice design of the Nvidia logo. The card also has a lighting gimmick where the GEFORCE text is illuminated in green for a nice cool effect for your rig.

The Performance

As it was stated that the GTX 1070 can outperform the GTX 980 Ti and Titan X despite having higher CUDA cores and texture units, we then tested the GTX 1070 in some of the latest games that requires higher processing power for the visuals.

Tested on the Unigine Heaven and 3DMark, the result were impressive. On the Unigine Heaven benchmark, it managed to get maintain 60 frames per second on the highest setting with some slight dips on scenes that are heavy on lights and shadows. Benchmarking it on the Firestrike demo in 3DMark shows that it can run above 60 frames with some slight dips to around 53 frames. Take note that the card was not even overclocked and you can expect higher results if the clock speed was increased.

Now for the games, we tested with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on the highest setting and it can maintain a constant 60 frames per second in most areas and the occasional dip below 60 frames during scenes in populated areas, though the drop does not go below 52 frames. As for Street Fighter V, even on the max setting, there was no sign of any framerate drops as the game played very smooth, and then for Overwatch, there are occasional framerate drops during areas with full of characters, but it usually drops just around 2-3 frames, but otherwise it can run steadily at 60 frames. And we also decided to try an older game such as Torchlight 2 to see how high the framerate can be.

Conclusion

The GTX 1070 as expected can perform very well on high-end games on 1080p resolution and can perform well on 1440p, and overclocking the card will even provide better results and can outclass the 980 Ti and Titan X at a wider margin. However the major concern with the 1070 is the price tag, if you managed to find a Founder’s Edition, it will likely be at around PhP 30,000, so you are planning to get a 1070, better get the custom cards which are available at around PhP 25,000 to 28,000. But investing on this card will be worth it especially if you have been using the 7 series cards or older as the 1070’s performance from the 780 is almost double. So if you have a large budget but not enough for a 1080, the 1070 will be a better choice, it runs very well on high graphics games and it is VR ready.

Good points

• Better than the Titan X and GTX 980 Ti
• VR ready
• Optimized for DirectX 12
• Sleek design for the Founder’s Edition
• 8 GB memory

Bad Points

• Almost as expensive as the GTX 1080
• Founder’s Edition is very expensive
• You need a monitor with 1440p resolution or above support to fully enjoy the card