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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Drunktroop - Sunday, September 21, 2014 - link
It is more like the G92s - 8800GT and 8800GTS 512 than HD4850 IMO.atl - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
In compute benchmark, i would appreciate some digital currency tests pack.Ryan Smith - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Could you please expand on that request?GPUs have been supplanted by FPGAs and ASICs for both Bitcoin (SHA-25) and Litecoin (scrypt). At this point I'm not convinced cryptocoin processing speeds are going to be relevant.
ABR - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Maybe not relevant for professional bitcoin miners as such, but a good benchmark of cryptography / big integer number crunching capabilities where a fair amount of effort has gone into optimizing the software for the hardware.Lux88 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
I want to thank Ryan for using FahBench.rickon66 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
I'm interested in 4K hardware, currently using 1600P Dell with a 780Ti OC and want to move up to 2160P. I'm hoping this 980 is fully compliant with HDMI 2.0!theMillen - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
you realize that if you're hoping for 2.0 compliance for a 4k monitor, you will want to use displayport.Hrobertgar - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
It sounds silly, but the pictures of the restaurant in the Voxel discussion look exactly like Poncho Villa's in Redondo Beach, Cali. That place was my favorite Mexican restaurant when I lived in Cali, and I always enjoyed Sunday Brunch there.Peichen - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
The one with the blue/white checkered table cloth? Maybe I will remember this when visiting CA in the future.SydneyBlue120d - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
I'd like to read in future testing how the new cards handle 4K60 footage in both HEVC and VP9 format. Here http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?111230... You can find some 4K materials e.g.