The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review: Maxwell Mark 2
by Ryan Smith on September 18, 2014 10:30 PM ESTTotal War: Rome 2
The second strategy game in our benchmark suite, Total War: Rome 2 is the latest game in the Total War franchise. Total War games have traditionally been a mix of CPU and GPU bottlenecks, so it takes a good system on both ends of the equation to do well here. In this case the game comes with a built-in benchmark that plays out over a forested area with a large number of units, definitely stressing the GPU in particular.
For this game in particular we’ve also gone and turned down the shadows to medium. Rome’s shadows are extremely CPU intensive (as opposed to GPU intensive), so this keeps us from CPU bottlenecking nearly as easily.
Of all of our games, there is no better set of benchmarks for the GTX 980 than Total War: Rome II. Against both AMD and NVIDIA’s last-generation cards it never wins by as much as it wins here.
Compared to the GTX 780 Ti the GTX 980 is a consistent 16-17% ahead at all resolutions. Meanwhile against the R9 280XU this is an 18% lead at 1080p and 1440p. R9 290XU only begins to catch up at 4K Very High quality, where GTX 980 still leads by a respectable 8%.
This is also a very strong showing compared to the GTX 680. The overall lead is 80-95% depending on the resolution. The GTX 980 was not necessarily meant to double the GTX 680’s performance, but it comes very close to doing so here at 1440p.
Given what happens to the GK104 cards in this game, I suspect we’re looking at the results of either the ROP advantage and/or a very good case CUDA core occupancy improvements. The fact that the lead over the GTX 780 Ti is so consistent over all resolutions does point to the CUDA core theory, but we can’t really rule out the ROPs with the information we have.
As for results on an absolute basis, not even mighty GTX 980 is going to crack 30fps at 4K with Extreme settings. In lieu of that Very High quality comes off quite well at 49fps, and we’re just shy of hitting 60fps at 1440p with Extreme.
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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!