The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review: Maxwell Mark 2
by Ryan Smith on September 18, 2014 10:30 PM ESTBioshock Infinite
Bioshock Infinite is Irrational Games’ latest entry in the Bioshock franchise. Though it’s based on Unreal Engine 3 – making it our obligatory UE3 game – Irrational had added a number of effects that make the game rather GPU-intensive on its highest settings. As an added bonus it includes a built-in benchmark composed of several scenes, a rarity for UE3 engine games, so we can easily get a good representation of what Bioshock’s performance is like.
Even with advanced depth of field effects, our highest end video cards are starting to run away with Bioshock: Infinite. That is particularly true for the GTX 980, which in a game that NVIDIA frequently does well in further props up the GTX 980’s advantage. Only at 4K are the R9 290XU and GTX 980 anywhere near close, otherwise at 1440p it’s a 37% performance advantage. GTX 780 Ti on the other hand holds much closer, still falling behind the GTX 980 but only by around 5% at sub-4K resolutions. This does make for a good moment for showcasing the GTX 980’s greater ROP throughput though; as we crank up the resolution to 4K, the 780 Ti falls further behind, especially when we’re at lower quality settings that leave us less shader-bound.
On an absolute basis 120Hz/144Hz gamer should have a blast even with a single GTX 980 at 1080p, while purists will need more performance for 1440p than the 85fps the card can offer. And at 4K the GTX 980 is doing very well for itself, almost cracking 60fps at High quality, and becoming the only card to crack 40fps with Ultra quality.
This will be one of the weaker showings for the GTX 980 over the GTX 680 though; at sub-4K resolutions it’s only a 60-65% performance improvement.
Meanwhile Bioshock is the first of 5 games we can reliably measure with the FCAT tools to check for frame pacing consistency. Bioshock is a bit more erratic than most games in this respect, and while our general rule of thumb for an excellent performance from a single card is 3%, our recording for GTX 980 is a bit higher at 3.5%. On the other hand at 4K it measures in at just 2.3%. So while frame pacing is going to be a bit of a rubber stamping process overall, we can confirm that GTX 980 is delivering a good frame pacing experience in Bioshock.
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takeship - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
The situation we have here now is very reminiscent of AMD's CPU position shortly after Core 2 hit the market. Nvidia now has a product with better performance, better efficiency, better (still) drivers & features, and similar pricing and that puts AMD in a bad way. The 3xx series had better seriously wow, or AMD's GPU division is quickly going to see the same market erosion that happened after Core 2/iCore. Personally, i think this is a knockout blow. - soon to be former 7970 ownerchizow - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
Maxwell is truly amazing stuff. Great advances from Nvidia in virtually every aspect.Not super thrilled about the 980 price at $550, the 970 price however is amazing at $329. I was going to go with the 980 but 2x970s seem more appealing. 970 is 13/16 SMXes but it retains the full 4GB, full 256-bit bus, full 64 ROPs. Hopefully there's a lot of 970s on the full 980 PCBs.
Jensen just confirmed the prices on the Live Stream.
shing3232 - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
they have efficiency advantage because because they use the best 28nm call hpm. they use high performance mobile process of course they are very efficientnkm90 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
From TSMCs website ( http://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/techn... )"The 28nm High Performance Mobile Computing (HPM) provides high performance for mobile applications to address the need for applications requiring high speed. Such technology can provide the highest speed among 28nm technologies. With such higher performance coverage, 28HPM is ideal for many applications from networking, and high-end smartphone/ mobile consumer products."It looks like the hpm process was designed for chips that would dissipate much less than the 150-200W this one does. I seriously doubt someone would use hpm for such high power chips. Also some body had the voltages for the gm204 chip; and the idle voltage was closer to the 0.85V of hp than the 0.9V of HPM
chizow - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
There's no indication they are using 28nm HPM, even the first Maxwell part (GM107) used 28nm HP and alluded to this amazing power/perf ratio we see today with GM104.It is obvious Nvidia's convergence of mobile *design* (not process) fundamentals helped them as we saw with Kepler, and this will only be further beneficial with their mobile Maxwell designs.
Sttm - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
Yeah I was looking at 970 results on other sites... its the 8800gt reborn! Almost top end performance, $220 in savings.chizow - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Yep the 970 is amazing price:perf, Newegg has them at the $330 price up to $350 for some custom/OC versions.I did end up going with a single 980 though. The difference in build quality is just too much and SLI with my new G-Sync monitor (Swift) have had issues with my current 670 SLI build. The scaling with SLI is also not exceptional with these Maxwell cards (~60%), so the improvement of 2x970 is actually not that much over a single highly overclocked 980.
Still amazing job by Nvidia, the 980 would have been a grand slam at $500 but it is still an Earl Weaver 3-run blast at $550.
uzun - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
When will these cards be available via newegg etc?arbit3r - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
i would guess later tonight maybe tomorrow though that might be wrong.chizow - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
They are available on Newegg.com now. Some SKUs are selling out now. I picked up two of the EVGA 980 SuperClocked models.