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When Nvidia announced its all-new GPUs based on its Pascal architecture, the GTX 1080 ($600 - $700 on Amazon) stole all the headlines with its flagship specs, but its less-expensive baby brother­­ – the GTX 1070 ($400 - $450 on Amazon) (£375 at Amazon UK) ­– stole everyone’s hearts. That’s because the golden rule in the GPU world is that the top card always comes with an exorbitant “fastest card” tax, while the model right below it is usually only a bit slower but much less expensive (this same rule also applies in the CPU world too).

Such is the case for the GTX 1070, which seems to offer about 20% less performance than the GTX 1080 based on its specs, but is around 45% less expensive. Even though a $400 GPU is still pricy, that’s a smokin’ bargain in comparison, making the GTX 1070 the top contender for “most bang for the buck” GPU on the market. Like the GTX 1080, Nvidia is offering the GTX 1070 in both a Founder’s Edition for $449 and versions designed by its partners for $379 and up.

The Numbers

Though the GPU inside the GTX 1070’s is a cut-down version of the chip used in the GTX 1080, named GP104, it received a relatively conservative neutering to keep it within striking distance of its big brother. As the chart shows, the trimming of the GTX 1080’s silicon occurred in a few distinct spots: it has 33% less CUDA cores, a 50MHz slower Boost Clock, and slower memory (10Gb/s vs. 8Gb/s) that overall grants the GTX 1070 25% less memory bandwidth, though both cards use the same 256-bit wide path. These reductions in overall power allow the GTX 1070 to have a 30w lower TDP than the 1080 at 150w, though the cards are physically the same size and both use a single eight-pin PCIe connector.

Since the GTX 1070 uses the exact same GPU as the 1080 all the same features are baked into it, including Nvidia’s Ansel screenshot technology, Simultaneous Multi-Projection for VR and multiple displays, and Fast Sync for e-sports gamers. It also does not allow for more than two-card configurations, like the GTX 1080, as the card’s fingers for expansion are both occupied by Nvidia’s new dual-channel SLI connector.

Benchmarks

“ The GTX 1070 is also about 15 to 20% faster than the Radeon R9 Fury.

When the resolution is lowered a bit to the GTX 1070’s native habitat of 2560x1440, the card was able to exceed 60fps in every test we ran except Hitman: Absolution, where it came so close at 54.4fps. It also opened up a bit of a gap between it and the GTX 980 Ti too, running about five to 15% faster overall, and about 30% faster than the GTX 980. It also spanked the Fury X and vanilla Fury as well by huge margins. Compared to the GTX 1080, the 1070 was only 15 to 25% slower, as expected.

At 1080p resolution the delta to the 980 Ti hovered from non-existent to around 15% depending on the title, similar to the experience we had at higher resolutions. In fact, all of our results are basically the same as they were at 2560x1440, with the GTX 970 running about 30 to 40% slower overall than GTX 1070.

The DirectX 12 benchmarks aren’t too revealing in that we see the same performance scaling between Nvidia cards for the most part, but they do show that in Hitman and Ashes of the Singularity the competition between the older AMD cards and the newer Nvidia GPUs is quite close. This bodes well for AMD obviously but we really do need more benchmarks in order to clearly define the lay of the land in the DX12 world as it’s still quite nascent.

Overclocking

“ It’s about 75% faster than the GTX 970 it replaces.

The card we were sent for testing wasn’t too cooperative though, and ended up running at 196MHz over its Base Clock, finishing its run at 1,702MHz, which is low for these cards. We anticipate most cards would be able to run somewhere around 1,900MHz at least, and if you have a good card and adequate cooling you might be able to nudge up against 2GHz based on what we’ve seen. Partner cards are also a better deal for overclocking compared to the Founder’s Edition, as they have beefier coolers, and some also increase the card’s voltage too.

Since we tested the GTX 1080 before the GTX 1070, we had a good idea of what it would be capable of, which is basically about 20% less performance. That’s exactly what we got, and the fact that it sells of about half of what the GTX 1080 is going for makes it an incredible value. It’s also about 75% faster than the GTX 970 it replaces, making it a hell of an upgrade considering it’s just one generation newer. Though performance is quite close to the GTX 980 Ti, it is still overall a bit faster, and 980 Ti cards are also still priced way too high in most cases (around $650 still, for some reason) to even be taken seriously. If you can get one for $300 or so it would be a better deal than the GTX 1070, though you would miss out on its VR capabilities, Ansel technology, and the cool factor of having a newer GPU.

Purchasing Guide

This evaluation specifically focuses on the initial "Founders Edition" of the GTX 1070. In the months since its launch, a variety of marginally-improved 1070s have been released from a variety of manufacturers. Prices range from $395 - $400. You can expect slightly improved benchmarks for these 1070 variants. Prices may vary, but below are a few of the best current purchasing options for the GTX 1070: