The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review: Maxwell Mark 2
by Ryan Smith on September 18, 2014 10:30 PM ESTGRID 2
The final game in our benchmark suite is also our racing entry, Codemasters’ GRID 2. Codemasters continues to set the bar for graphical fidelity in racing games, and with GRID 2 they’ve gone back to racing on the pavement, bringing to life cities and highways alike. Based on their in-house EGO engine, GRID 2 includes a DirectCompute based advanced lighting system in its highest quality settings, which incurs a significant performance penalty but does a good job of emulating more realistic lighting within the game world.
Our final game is another solid victory for the GTX 980. The GTX 980’s lead does shrink at 4K, otherwise we’re looking at a 12% advantage over the GTX 780 Ti and 14-23% over R9 290XU.
144Hz gamers will find 1080p quite useful, with the GTX 980 coming just short of averaging a matching framerate. Otherwise for 2560p one would need to settle for 101fps. Though for 4K gamers, even a single GTX 980 is more or less enough here; 53fps at 4K with Maximum quality and 4x MSAA means that at most a drop to 2x MSAA would get it above 60fps without involving a second card. Maybe this is a good case for NVIDIA’s new Multi-Frame sampled Anti-Aliasing?
Our last set of delta percentages once again finds the GTX 980 easily below 3%. Though the variance is higher than with the other two cards, and by more than just what we would expect as a result of higher average framerates.
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Stuka87 - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
Why is it you guys are still using reference 290/290X cards for testing? Are they even being sold anymore?Oh, and I am having trouble believing nVidias claimed power consumption. It's certainly lower than a 780ti or 290x but not the 90W that is claimed according to the graphs.
arbit3r - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
looked at a few review sites, and its least 90watts some sites its a lot more but one that is closest is still about 90. AMD has been known to under state the true draw of their cards and even their CPU's. It tends to be higher then they say.Ryan Smith - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
We use reference cards whenever possible. And yes, the reference 290X is still being sold.That said, we include both normal and uber modes for this reason. Uber mode will be comparable to an open air (custom) 290X.
Stuka87 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Except when it comes to noise and heat, the open air cards are significantly better there. But I understand why you use reference cards.bill5 - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
Barely beating AMD's ancient R9 290X...doesn't look good for Nvidia's new generation considering AMD's new line is due soon at the high end. Yet they barely need it as their old line is close to competitive already!arbit3r - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
it beats it using like 75-100+watts less power. On top of being overclocking monster where as AMD's card doesn't Overclock so much.kron123456789 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
I think the new top-end AMDs card will have TDP around 350-400W and have a cooler similar to 295X2 :)jase240 - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
Many of the pages are blank and show nothing for me, including the overclocking section.Stuka87 - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
If you read the first page, Ryan stated that things are still being uploaded.SirMaster - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Where are the Overclocking results?