The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review: Maxwell Mark 2
by Ryan Smith on September 18, 2014 10:30 PM ESTCrysis 3
Still one of our most punishing benchmarks, Crysis 3 needs no introduction. With Crysis 3, Crytek has gone back to trying to kill computers and still holds “most punishing shooter” title in our benchmark suite. Only in a handful of setups can we even run Crysis 3 at its highest (Very High) settings, and that’s still without AA. Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to drive games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2014.
Meanwhile delta percentage performance is extremely strong here. Everyone, including the GTX 980, is well below 3%.
Always a punishing game, Crysis 3 ends up being one of the only games the GTX 980 doesn’t take a meaningful lead on over the GTX 780 Ti. To be clear the GTX 980 wins in most of these benchmarks, but not in all of them, and even when it does win the GTX 780 Ti is never far behind. For this reason the GTX 980’s lead over the GTX 780 Ti and the rest of our single-GPU video cards is never more than a few percent, even at 4K. Otherwise at 1440p we’re looking at the tables being turned, with the GTX 980 taking a 3% deficit. This is the only time the GTX 980 will lose to NVIDIA’s previous generation consumer flagship.
As for the comparison versus AMD’s cards, NVIDIA has been doing well in Crysis 3 and that extends to the GTX 980 as well. The GTX 980 takes a 10-20% lead over the R9 290XU depending on the resolution, with its advantage shrinking as the resolution grows. During the launch of the R9 290 series we saw that AMD tended to do better than NVIDIA at higher resolutions, and while this pattern has narrowed some, it has not gone away. AMD is still the most likely to pull even with the GTX 980 at 4K resolutions, despite the additional ROPS available to the GTX 980.
This will also be the worst showing for the GTX 980 relative to the GTX 680. GTX 980 is still well in the lead, but below 4K that lead is just 44%. NVIDIA can’t even do 50% better than the GTX 680 in this game until we finally push the GTX 680 out of its comfort zone at 4K.
All of this points to Crysis 3 being very shader limited at these settings. NVIDIA has significantly improved their CUDA core occupancy on Maxwell, but in these extreme situations GTX 980 will still struggle with the CUDA core deficit versus GK110, or the limited 33% increase in CUDA cores versus GTX 680. Which is a feather in Kepler’s cap if anything, showing that it’s not entirely outclassed if given a workload that maps well to its more ILP-sensitive shader architecture.
The delta percentage story continues to be unremarkable with Crysis 3. GTX 980 does technically fare a bit worse, but it’s still well under 3%. Keep in mind that delta percentages do become more sensitive at higher framerates (there is less absolute time to pace frames), so a slight increase here is not unexpected.
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mesahusa - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
Nvidia and AMD havent moved to 22 because they don't have the funding. Intel has tens of billions to blow away in R&D. Broadwells going to be released in 2015, and its 14nm.Hrel - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
In light of Nvidia not even trying to reduce manufacturing nodes It would be really nice to see them go on the offensive in the price war. $300 for the GTX980, everything lower from there. Probably not now, but like, spring 2015, that'd be great! Make good and sure to wipe out all the hold outs (like myself) keeping their old cards because they still play everything they play on 1080p. Kinda, get all your customers caught up on hardware in the same upgrade time frame.Then when they finally do drop nodes they can focus on making every card they sell run games at 8K resolution.
Nfarce - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Hate to break the news to you, but if you want to game at high level (above 1080p), you need to pay at high level. There is nothing new about that in the entire history of PC enthusiast building and gaming either for those of us who remember making the "huge leap" from a 15" 1024x768 resolution CRT monitor to a whopping 19" 1600x1200 CRT monitor. At least not in the 20 years since I've been involved with it anyway.Besides all that, that's why GPU makers offer cards for different budgets. If you can't afford their top tier products, you can't afford to game top tier. Period and end of discussion.
tuxRoller - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
It seems as though the big improvement nvidia has made is to enable cpu-level scheduling/dvfs granularity into their chip. However, once all cores are engaged it ends up using as much power as its predecessor (see tomshardware).What I really want to know is how much of this due to purely driver-level changes.
yhselp - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
Exceptional design. The sad thing is that NVIDIA will take forever to release a 30 SMM Maxwell GPU and once it finally does, it would cost a ton; even later on when they release a "budget" version for an unreasonable price of around $650 it would be too late - the great performance potential of today wouldn't be so great tomorrow. Striving for and building amazing GPUs is the right way forward, not empowering the people with them is a crime. Whatever happened to $500 flagship products?Rhodie - Wednesday, September 24, 2014 - link
Just got a GTX970, and only latest Nvidia drivers will install for 9xx series cards it seems. Unfortunately the latest drivers totally screw up some programs that use CUDA, seem to hide itspresence from programs lile Xillisoft Video Convertor Ultimate:-/ No response of course from either Nvidia or Xillisoft regarding the problem. Wonder how many other programs the drivers break?
garadante - Thursday, September 25, 2014 - link
Geeze. Anandtech, do an updated best value graphics card list because since the launch of the 970/980 retailers are giving some serious price cuts to 770/780/780 Ti's. Newegg has a 780 for less than $300 after rebate and just a hair over $300 before rebate. I'm seeing 780 Ti's for ~$430 and 770s for ~$240. I am amazed to see price cuts this deep since I haven't seen them the last several generations and considering how overpriced these cards were. But while supplies last and prices hold/drop, this completely flips price/performance on it's head. I feel bad recommending an AMD 290 Tri-X to a friend a couple months back now. xDgaradante - Thursday, September 25, 2014 - link
Please do an updates best value graphics card* Where are my manners! D:jman9295 - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Newegg has an Asus DirectCU II GTX 780 selling in the $290 range after a mail in rebate, promo code and discount. It also comes with a pre-order copy of the new Borderlands game. That has to be the best value to performance GPU out right now. It is almost a full $100 less than the cheapest non-reference R9 290 on newegg and $40 less than the cheapest reference R9 290 which is crazy since this same Asus GTX 780 was selling for over $550 just last month with no free games (and still is on Amazon for some reason).mixer4x - Thursday, September 25, 2014 - link
I feel bad for having just bought the 290 tri-x just a month ago! =(I bought it because you never know when the new cards will be released and how much they will cost. Unfortunately, the new cards came out too soon!