Upgraded GTX 970 to GTX 1080 (FE) - Initial Thoughts
Yesterday I received my EVGA GTX 1080 FE.
It was an upgrade from the EVGA GTX 970 (ACX 1.0) I had been using while I waited for Pascal.
Just prior to removing the 970 I decided to run Firemark Ultra, receiving a measly 2096 marks. I was hitting ~12 FPS in many of the scenes. Bleh.
The makers of 3DMark actually say somewhere in the 2500 range is acceptable for VR so I was below their recommendation.
Despite my woefully inadequate computer, I met the min specs according to Oculus and had enjoyed my time with PC, AC, ED, and most recently Chronos. It was good enough.
But now I have a GTX 1080.
My first impression is that everything just feels a little... smoother. Just like how 1.3 seemed to make everything crisper in a way that was difficult to nail down, the 1080 is just all around better than the 970. It FEELS faster and smoother.
However, to ensure this wasn't just confirmation bias I threw Firemark Ultra back on.
Over 5000. Frames in the 26-27 range. I'm happy. It made a pretty massive difference.
The rest of my system is an MSI m7 hosting an i5 6600k and 16gigs of g.skill 3200. Win 10 on a Samsung SSD, with a 1TB hybrid drive for storage.
It was absolutely worth the wait. I cranked the settings in ED up to max and nary a stutter. In the next few days I'll play around with debug SS and see what sort of difference I notice. Same with Project Cars, although I was just doing solo lapping at Infineon so I can't comment on performance with a dozen cars on the circuit with me.
