Crysis 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 2015.

Crysis 3 - 3840x2160 - High Quality + FXAA

Crysis 3 - 3840x2160 - Low Quality + FXAA

Crysis 3 - 2560x1440 - High Quality + FXAA

Once more we find the GTX 980 Ti and GTX Titan X virtually tied. Across all settings and resolutions the GTX 980 Ti stays within 97-98% of the Titan’s performance. Consequently GTX Titan X is ever so marginally better, but not enough to make any real difference.

This also means that GTX 980 Ti continues with its very strong lead over the GTX 980. Once more we’re looking at a 26-31% performance advantage for the latest member of the GTX 900 series, in-line with its price premium.

Meanwhile on an absolute basis, as one of our most punishing games this is also a good reminder of why even GM200 cards can’t quite pull off high quality 4K gaming with a single GPU today. Even without MSAA and one step below Crysis 3’s Very High quality settings, the GTX 980 Ti can only muster 40.9fps. If you want to get to 60fps you will need to drop to Low quality, or drop the resolution to 1440p. The latter will get you 83.2fps at the same quality settings, which again highlights GTX 980 Ti’s second strength as a good card for driving high refresh rate 1440p displays.

Battlefield 4 Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
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  • 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 TX
  • truongpham - 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

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