The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review: Maxwell Mark 2

Total 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.