Nvidia Mass Test – Everything from the GTX 1060 to the RTX 4080
Wrap Up
Okay, we’re not busting down any doors or blowing any minds by saying that the newer the card, the better the performance. However, given how often we’re asked if a RTX 3070 is actually any better than a GTX 1080 Ti, it’s nice to show off a ton of hard data the back up our claims that, with Nvidia graphics cards, newer almost always equals better.
The leap from GTX to RTX came with the early implementation of hardware ray tracing and DLSS, and whilst the ray tracing on the 2000 series was still a bit of a tech demo more than something you could use every day, DLSS was totally game changing. The 3000 cards solved the ray tracing performance issue and meant that, with some careful choices about which game you turned it on in, you could see all those carefully calculated reflections without too much of a performance hit. Unsurprisingly the 4000 series refined this further, and came with DLSS 3 and Frame Generation. Just like the first implementation of DLSS, Framegen gives you massive performance increases with an almost undetectable loss of visual fidelity. Yes in static A/B comparisons you might spot the odd area where Framegen is compromising to give you that extra performance, but in motion when actually playing you just can’t tell the visual difference. You sure do notice going from 50 FPS to 150 FPS though.
However, we know some people are sniffy about technologies like DLSS and FSR. That’s where our testing in the mode we called Vanilla comes in. This is just testing the raw performance of the cards, and even there you can see that, bar a few exceptions, every card is faster than the one before. There are occasions where legendary cards such as the GTX 1080 Ti show they can still get the job done but, in short, the newer your card and the further up the Nvidia range it is the better your results will be. Not rocket science, but nice to have backed up with numbers to prove it.
It’s been a brilliant few years to be hardcore gamers and we can’t wait to see what the future has in store.
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