The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review: Maxwell Mark 2
by Ryan Smith on September 18, 2014 10:30 PM ESTBattlefield 4
Our latest addition to our benchmark suite and our current major multiplayer action game of our benchmark suite is Battlefield 4, DICE’s 2013 multiplayer military shooter. After a rocky start, Battlefield 4 has finally reached a point where it’s stable enough for benchmark use, giving us the ability to profile one of the most popular and strenuous shooters out there. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, based on our experiences our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, which means a card needs to be able to average at least 60fps if it’s to be able to hold up in multiplayer.
Battlefield 4 is one of our tougher games, especially with the bar set at 60fps to give us enough headroom for multiplayer performance. To that end the GTX 980 turns in another solid performance, though the dream of averaging 60fps at 1440p Ultra is going to have to wait just a bit longer to be answered.
Overall on a competitive basis the GTX 980 looks very strong. Against the GTX 780 Ti it further improves on performance by 8-13%, 30%+ against GTX 780, and 66% against GTX 680. Similarly it fares well against AMD’s cards – even with their Mantle performance advantage – with the exception of one case: 4K at Medium quality. With maximum quality settings, at all resolutions the GTX 980 can outperform AMD’s best by around 15%. But in the case of 4K Medium, with the lesser shader overhead in particular the R9 290XU gets to pull ahead thanks to Mantle. At this point NVIDIA is losing by just 4%, but it goes to show how close the race between these two cards is going to be at times and why AMD is never too far behind NVIDIA in several of these games.
In any case for Ultra quality you’re looking at the GTX 980 being enough for 1080p and even 1440p if you flex the 60fps rule a bit. 4K at these settings though is going to be the domain of multi-GPU setups.
Meanwhile delta percentage performance is extremely strong here. Everyone, incuding the GTX 980, is well below 3%.
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CrystalBay - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Are these parts going to be full DX12 compliant ?extide - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Noarbit3r - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
yes, it says it is.rahvin - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
14nm is the first process node since they started building IC's that costs more than the prior generation. It would appear that the days of continually dropping prices are gone if this remains true. People really fail to realize how significant this is and it's likely to have profound impacts on the industry for the foreseeable future. It's quite possible that process advances will slow down dramatically as a result of the higher costs because the producers are no longer guaranteed a lower priced product for the same input. Continually improving products at lower prices may be a thing of the past in the CPU space.vailr - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Will there also later be a Maxwell GPU successor to nVidia's GTX 760?extide - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Yes, of coursemartixy - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
The universe is oddly self-correcting when it comes to those types of things. The hiccup in the process node seemingly comes at just the right time, to kick designer's asses into letting go of that mad dash for transistors and focus on intelligent and efficient design instead.Vinny DePaul - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Does it mean it is time for me to sell my GTX 770 and buy GTX 970?wolfman3k5 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Why would anyone buy your GTX 770 when they could easily be buying a GTX 970 now?!Laststop311 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Vinny that depends. If you are gaming at 1080 res there is no point. At 1440 it would depend on the game but for the most part the 770 is still fine. I don't think you should waste your money but to each his own.