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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nathanddrews - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
http://www.pcper.com/files/review/2014-09-18/power...kron123456789 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Different tests, different results. That's nothing new.kron123456789 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
But, i still think that Nvidia isn't understated TDP of the 980 and 970.Friendly0Fire - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Misleading. If a card pumps out more frames (which the 980 most certainly does), it's going to drive up requirements for every other part of the system, AND it's going to obviously draw its maximum possible power. If you were to lock the framerate to a fixed value that all GPUs could reach the power savings would be more evident.Also, TDP is the heat generation, as has been said earlier here, which is correlated but not equal to power draw. Heat is waste energy, so the less heat you put out the more energy you actually use to work. All this means is that (surprise surprise) the Maxwell 2 cards are a lot more efficient than AMD's GCN.
shtldr - Wednesday, September 24, 2014 - link
"TDP is the heat generation, as has been said earlier here, which is correlated but not equal to power draw."The GPU is a system which consumes energy. Since the GPU does not use that energy to create mass (materialization) or chemical bonds (battery), where the energy goes is easily observed from the outside.
1) waste heat
2) moving air mass through the heatsink (fan)
3) signalling over connects (PCIe and monitor cable)
4) EM waves
5) degradation/burning out of card's components (GPU silicon damage, fan bearing wear etc.)
And that's it. The 1) is very dominant compared to the rest. There's no "hidden" work being done by the card. It would be against the law of conservation of energy (which is still valid, as far as I know).
Frenetic Pony - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
That's a misunderstanding of what TDP has to do with desktop cards. Now for mobile stuff, that's great. But the bottlenecks for "Maxwell 2" isn't in TDP, it's in clockspeeds. Meaning the efficiency argument is useless if the end user doesn't care.Now, for certain fields the end user cares very much. Miners have apparently all moved onto ASIC stuff, but for other compute workloads any end user is going to choose NVIDIA currently, just to save on their electricity bill. For the consumer end user, TDP doesn't matter nearly as much unless you're really "Green" conscious or something. In that case AMD's 1 year old 290x competes on price for performance, and whatever AMD's update is it will do better.
It's hardly a death knell of AMD, not the best thing considering they were just outclassed for corporate type compute work. But for your typical consumer end user they aren't going to see any difference unless they're a fanboy one way or another, and why bother going after a strongly biased market like that?
pendantry - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
While it's a fair argument that unless you're environmentally inclined the energy savings from lower TDP don't matter, I'd say a lot more people do care about reduced noise and heat. People generally might not care about saving $30 a year on their electricity bill, but why would you choose a hotter noisier component when there's no price or performance benefit to that choice.AMD GPUs now mirror the CPU situation where you can get close to performance parity if you're willing to accept a fairly large (~100W) power increase. Without heavy price incentives it's hard to convince the consumer to tolerate what is jokingly termed the "space heater" or "wind turbine" inconvenience that the AMD product presents.
Laststop311 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
actually the gpu's from amd do not mirror the cpu situation at all. amd' fx 9xxx with the huge tdp and all gets so outperformed by even the i7-4790k on almost everything and the 8 core i7-5960x obliterates it in everything, the performance of it's cpu's are NOT close to intels performance even with 100 extra watts. At least with the GPU's the performance is close to nvidias even if the power usage is not.TLDR amd's gpu situation does not mirror is cpu situation. cpu situation is far worse.
Laststop311 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
I as a consumer greatly care about the efficinecy and tdp and heat and noise not just the performance. I do not like hearing my PC. I switched to all noctua fans, all ssd storage, and platinum rated psu that only turns on its fan over 500 watts load. The only noise coming from my PC is my radeon 5870 card basically. So the fact this GPU is super quiet means no matter what amd does performance wise if it cant keep up noise wise they lose a sale with me as i'm sure many others.And im not a fanboy of either company i chose the 5870 over the gtx 480 when nvidia botched that card and made it a loud hot behemoth. And i'll just as quickly ditch amd for nvidia for the same reason.
Kvaern - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
"For the consumer end user, TDP doesn't matter nearly as much unless you're really "Green""Or live in a country where taxes make up 75% of your power bill \