The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Review
by Ryan Smith on May 31, 2015 6:00 PM ESTCivilization: Beyond Earth
Shifting gears from action to strategy, we have Civilization: Beyond Earth, the latest in the Civilization series of strategy games. Civilization is not quite as GPU-demanding as some of our action games, but at Ultra quality it can still pose a challenge for even high-end video cards. Meanwhile as the first Mantle-enabled strategy title Civilization gives us an interesting look into low-level API performance on larger scale games, along with a look at developer Firaxis’s interesting use of split frame rendering with Mantle to reduce latency rather than improving framerates.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the GTX 980 Ti and GTX Titan perform within a few percent of each other. Under Civilization the gap between the two is a hair larger than in other games, at 3-4%, but this is also as large of a gap as you’ll see for average framerates. Even here the two are for all meaningful purposes tied.
Meanwhile on an absolute basis, the GM200 twin remain the only single-GPU cards to crack 60fps, with GTX 980 Ti delivering 70.5fps at the game’s most extreme setting. This is once again well ahead of the GTX 980 – beating it by 34% at 4K, though by less at lower resolutions where we start to get CPU-bottlenecked.
I also want to quickly touch upon how the GTX 980 Ti compares to the last-generation high-end GK110 Kepler cards, the GTX 780 and GTX 780 Ti. Against GTX 780 in particular, in this test we see the GTX 980 Ti deliver 70-80% better performance. With this being the 2 year anniversary of the GTX 780’s release, this is especially notable since it’s such a good example of how performance has improved specifically at this $649 price point in the last 2 years. GM200 in general is not this fast versus GK110 – there’s only so much to be done at 28nm – but against GTX 780 in particular NVIDIA’s latest card looks quite good. Even GTX 780 Ti is not entirely immune, with GTX 980 Ti beating it by around 45% at 4K.
When it comes to minimum framerates the same story continues; the two GM200 cards are very close to each other, staying within 5%. At worst, you can say that the 7-17% performance advantage over the GTX 980 isn’t very impressive, though this is admittedly a game that’s not too far off from being CPU-bottlenecked.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
290 Comments
View All Comments
Daroller - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
HAHAHAHAHA website lagged out and triple posted. That's awesome. Go go Google Chrome!naxeem - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
I don't think it is all good with the overclocking part. On stock air (albeit 80% fan speed unless used Accelero IV at 40%) cooler TitanX cards easily get to 1300/1440 normal/boost clocks. Same cards on water got to 1375/1500 with cool-ish 55°C at max load. That applies to two TitanX in SLI with modified BIOS that allows for more power consumption and thus removes artificial limit.Since the chip is identical and 980Ti is actually partially defective TitanX with 50% less RAM and switched off defective parts, I highly doubt clock potential differs, especially not in favor of 980Ti.
I would and do expect 980Ti to clock the same as Titan X (loosing some on chip quality, gaining some on half the VRAM).
FlushedBubblyJock - Saturday, June 13, 2015 - link
Nope. Other test sites show the opposite - 980TI is an overclock monster and beats the TXtruongpham - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Ryan, can you bench this one with Windows 10 and DX12?Ryan Smith - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
We won't be doing any complete Win10 benchmarking until that OS is finished and released. As for DX12, there are no games out yet that re using it; the handful of benchmarks are focused tech demos.cknobman - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Nvidia must have seen some undisclosed AMD benchmarks, went into panic mode, and rushed a release for the 980TI to get customers before the AMD launch.While its a great card the problem is Nvidia screwed some of their own customers.
I take this as a sign that whatever AMD is coming out with must be pretty good. :)
galta - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Maybe, but it could prove to be of little importance.You see, Win10 will be out on June 29th. Realistically speaking, DX12 games won't be real before Christmas or 2016.
It is more than enough time for a possible counterstrike from nVidia.
Having said that, unless one really really needs to upgrade now I would strongly recommend waiting for another month, just to check what Fiji is up to.
As of me, I have a pair of 980GTX Strix and have been with nVidia for a while, but I really hope AMD gets this one right.
Real competition is always good.
JayFiveAlive - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
I've been waiting for this beast to drop... now to decide whether it's a good time to bite.Current setup is a 2500K OC to 4.4Ghz and a GTX 670, so kinda oldish... Was considering upgrading to a Skylake proc come Sept and this 980 Ti, but probably Gigabyte variant... hmmm.
Peichen - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Why upgrade CPU? 2500K at 4.4GHz is still very fast and shouldn't affect performance of a 980Ti much. Maybe 10% less fps vs if you have a 6-core Extreme but why spend $300-400 to get 10% improvement?mapesdhs - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link
Plus if he does need some more CPU oomph, just put in a 2700K. I've built six so far, every one of them happily runs at 5GHz with just a decent air cooler & one fan for quiet operation, though for final setups I use an H80 and two quiet fans. Some games will benefit from more than 4 cores, depends on the game (eg. PvP online FPS can involve a lot of host side scripting, eg. Project Reality, and the upcoming Squad).True though, 2500K is still very potent, just built a 4.8 setup for a friend. She lives on an island, it'll probably be the quickest system for miles around. :D