When comparing AMD Radeon R9 Fury X vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080, the Slant community recommends NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 for most people. In the question“What are the best GPUs for gaming?” NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 is ranked 5th while AMD Radeon R9 Fury X is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 is:
In benchmarks, the GTX 1080 FE (Founder's Edition) is a hair slower than *two* GTX 980 units in SLI configuration (the difference is 2% in 3DMark 11). In gaming tests, the GTX 1080 FE achieved 61fps average in Need For Speed 2016 on high settings at 4K resolution. For comparison, the AMD Radeon R9 Fury scored 40fps (34% lower), and the GTX 980 scored 34fps (44% lower than the GTX 1080 FE). The only slowdowns you will encounter in maxed out 4K graphics is during extremely demanding scenes. The GTX 1080 FE also supports GPU Boost 3.0 which lets it ramp up performance even higher as long as the temperature doesn't rise too much.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Fast memory speeds
Using High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) this card can provide much faster speeds than GDDR5 (which many current graphics cards use). This allows for a peak throughput of 512GB/s. This is accomplished by stacking DRAM vertically.
Pro Liquid cooling for low heat and noise
The closed-loop liquid cooling circuit that comes with this graphics card helps cool it much more effectively than air can, and also produces less noise than a regular stock air fan would (especially AMDs stock cooling fans which are regarded as some of the loudest out there). Overall a good choice for quite AMD cooling out of the box.
Pro Great power efficiency
The idle power consumption is under 5W, which is helped by the more power friendly HBM as opposed to GDDR5 configuration.
Gaming power requirements are also good - an average of around 225W. This beats the GeForce GTX 980 Ti by a small margin.
Pro Great fps when playing high end games
Battlefield 4 @1440p: 67.8fps average (54 min/82 max)
@2160p: 35.8fps average (28 min/44max)
Far Cry 4 @1440p: 77.4fps average (61 min/112 max)
@2160p: 44.4fps average (34 min/61 max)
Grand Theft Auto V @1440p: 72.9fps average (54 min/97 max)
@2160p: 38.4fps average (28 min/47 max)
The Witcher 3 @1440p: 59.2fps average (47 min/68 max)
@2160p: 36.6fps average (28 min/41 max)
Pro Epic 4K performance
In benchmarks, the GTX 1080 FE (Founder's Edition) is a hair slower than two GTX 980 units in SLI configuration (the difference is 2% in 3DMark 11).
In gaming tests, the GTX 1080 FE achieved 61fps average in Need For Speed 2016 on high settings at 4K resolution. For comparison, the AMD Radeon R9 Fury scored 40fps (34% lower), and the GTX 980 scored 34fps (44% lower than the GTX 1080 FE).
The only slowdowns you will encounter in maxed out 4K graphics is during extremely demanding scenes.
The GTX 1080 FE also supports GPU Boost 3.0 which lets it ramp up performance even higher as long as the temperature doesn't rise too much.
Pro Well optimized
NVIDIA properly optimized the GTX 1080 FE for DirectX. This means that games supporting DirectX 11 will see a slight performance boost, but more-so for the upcoming games using DirectX12.
Pro Very power efficient
While performance is higher than its competitors, the GTX 1080 FE actually uses less power. The maximum amount of power consumption this GPU requires is around 185 watts, which is an improvement of over 35% compared to NVIDIA's previous generation high-end graphics card, the GTX 980 Ti. This also plays a positive role when choosing a power supply, or determining if you need to upgrade your existing PSU.
Cons
Con Ever present coil whine
The card emits a high pitch whine when in use (which is always). It may not be heard when the pump is in action as that itself is noisy, but the coil whine is definitely audible when the pump is not running, which can be pretty annoying. One caveat is that this may be louder on some cards over others, but there is no way to know until the card is used.
Con Cooling components vibrate
Because the pump needs to circulate water, it will cause some vibrations along the tubes. This may be annoying to some when running as it is audible.
Con No room for overclocking
Under a stress test, temperatures reach their maximum. This means that there is little to no room for aftermarket overclocking. Basically this card is already overclocked, which is why it comes with its own liquid cooling unit.
Con No native support for 3- and 4-way SLI
SLI - short for Scalable Link Interface - is NVIDIA's technology of combining the power of two or more identical GPU's in order to reach a better performance. In other words, you can use multiple GTX 1080 video cards to further increase performance. Although the GTX 1080 supports 2-way SLI without a problem, NVIDIA does not offer support for 3- and 4-way SLI. The included SLI-bridge which serves as a connector between the two cards, is only compatible in a 2-way configuration. 3-way and 4-way SLI are possible but aren't supported. You'll have to use an older SLI-bridge found on older GeForce models and you'll need to generate an 'Enthusiast Key' on NVIDIA's website. However, NVIDIA does not guarantee a 3- or 4-way configuration will provide any noticeable benefits.
Con Disappointing performance improvements when using Vulkan
Vulkan is a graphical API that allows developers to communicate better with the GPU, which in theory should result in performance improvements compared to the more standard DirectX 12 or OpenGL API's. The GTX 1080 doesn't perform particularly better in Vulkan however, and the difference with the standard OpenGL is minimal at higher resolutions.
Doom is one of the first (and only) titles with support for Vulkan and serves as a good benchmark for OpenGL vs Vulkan performance. In 1080p Full HD resolution and Ultra settings, the GTX 1080 is able to reach an average framerate of 140 FPS in OpenGL. Vulkan improves the frame rate to 166 FPS, a fifteen percent increase. Starting from 1440p resolutions however, performance improvements using Vulkan are very minimal and not noticeable during gameplay. 1080 does pretty well at 109 FPS in 1440p, while Vulkan only marginally improves this result with 145 FPS, a 5% increase. For comparison: AMD's RX 480 card does perform significantly better with Vulkan and higher frame rates, with a performance boost of 29.3%. Similar results are seen when testing in 4K. In this case, the GTX 1080 using Vulkan actually performs worse than the standard OpenGL, with 59 FPS and 60 FPS respectively. AMD's RX 480 is better optimized, as it's able to achieve a performance increase of 24.7% in this scenario.
In short, Vulkan performance seems particularly useful when gaming in Full HD, but it doesn't provide much performance benefits otherwise. It would appear that NVIDIA's Pascal architecture isn't optimized for high-resolution Vulkan gaming.