The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review: Maxwell Mark 2
by Ryan Smith on September 18, 2014 10:30 PM ESTMetro: Last Light
As always, kicking off our look at performance is 4A Games’ latest entry in their Metro series of subterranean shooters, Metro: Last Light. The original Metro: 2033 was a graphically punishing game for its time and Metro: Last Light is in its own right too. On the other hand it scales well with resolution and quality settings, so it’s still playable on lower end hardware.
As has become customary for us for the last couple of high-end video card reviews, we’re going to be running all of our 4K video card benchmarks at both high quality and at a lower quality level. In practice not even GTX 980 is going to be fast enough to comfortably play most of these games at 3840x2160 with everything cranked up – that is going to be multi-GPU territory – so for that reason we’re including a lower quality setting to showcase just what performance looks like at settings more realistic for a single GPU.
GTX 980 comes out swinging in our first set of benchmarks. If there was any doubt that it could surpass the likes of R9 290XU and GTX 780 Ti, then this first benchmark is a great place to set those doubts to rest. At all resolutions and quality settings it comes out on top, surpassing NVIDIA’s former consumer flagship by anywhere from a few percent to 12% at 4K with high quality settings. Otherwise against the R9 290XU it’s a consistent 13% lead at 2560 and 4K Medium.
In absolute terms this is enough performance to keep its average framerates well over 60fps at 2560, and even at 3840 Medium it comes just short of crossing the 60fps mark. High quality mode will take the wind out of GTX 980’s sails though, pushing framerates back into the borderline 30fps range.
Looking at NVIDIA’s last-generation parts for a moment, the performance gains over the lower tier GK110 based GTX 780 are around 25-35%. This is about where you’d expect to see a new GTX x80 card given NVIDIA’s quasi-regular 2 year performance upgrade cadence. And when extended out to a full 2 years, the performance advantage over GTX 680 is anywhere between 60% and 92% depending on the resolution we’re looking at. NVIDIA proclaims that GTX 980 will achieve 2x the performance per watt of GTX 680, and since GTX 980 is designed to operate at a lower TDP than GTX 680, as we can see it means performance over GTX 680 won’t quite be doubled in most cases.
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Nfarce - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Well that settles it then. I'll take two 870s for SLI (Guru3D has benches for it). Now the question remains what the vendors will actually sell them for and what the various versions will go for (factory overclocked, etc.). On top of the question of how hot an item these cards will be. I remember trying to get a 680 for nearly two weeks from the Egg just hitting page refresh randomly and hoping to catch a moment they were back in stock.HaB1971 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Newegg has the 970 for $339 on the front page of the Desktop video cards page... you can't search for them though oddly enoughInfy2 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
GTX 980 leaves TDP room for even faster card targeting 250W and beyond, but will there be one coming?Mr Perfect - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Seeing as this is only a GM204 part, it's probably safe to say there will be a GM210 part in the higher wattage ranges. Probably some damn fool $1000 Titan card...Laststop311 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
probably will see it as the titan 2 at 1000 first then a cheaper non titan version just like they did with gk110. Not until 20nm is sorted out thoevilspoons - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
So basically the 980 is my 680 SLI setup, but on a single card, plus some new features. And it's quieter and uses less power... And then you can SLI it later. Awesome!!Nfarce - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Yup! Just like my original single 680 was equal to two 570s. This wait was worth skipping the 7-series over. I have a feeling there are going to be a whole lot of 670s and 680s flooding the used market starting Friday.lilmoe - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
TSMC 28nm is showing its age...CristianMataoanu - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
I see the 980 is rated at 165W while the 680 is rated at 195W, But in the test results show that the total system consumption using the 980 is 8W higher than the one using the 680. I understand there may be some variantion of the cpu power because the 980 pushes more fps and therefore there is more work for the cpu.Is it posible that the 680 is less efficient in using its resources and therefore not being able to hit max tdp?
jay401 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
On the Power, Temp, and Noise page, the chart labeled "GeForce GTX 980 Average Clockspeeds" shows a label reading "Battlefield 3" instead of "Battlefield 4". =)