The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review: Maxwell Mark 2
by Ryan Smith on September 18, 2014 10:30 PM ESTCompany of Heroes 2
Our second benchmark in our benchmark suite is Relic Games’ Company of Heroes 2, the developer’s World War II Eastern Front themed RTS. For Company of Heroes 2 Relic was kind enough to put together a very strenuous built-in benchmark that was captured from one of the most demanding, snow-bound maps in the game, giving us a great look at CoH2’s performance at its worst. Consequently if a card can do well here then it should have no trouble throughout the rest of the game.
Since CoH2 is not AFR compatible, the best performance you’re going to get out of it is whatever you can get out of a single GPU. In which case the GTX 980 is the fastest card out there for this game. AMD’s R9 290XU does hold up well though; the GTX 980 may have a lead, but AMD is never more than a few percent behind at 4K and 1440p. The lead over the GTX 780 Ti is much more substantial on the other hand at 13% to 22%. So NVIDIA has finally taken this game back from AMD, as it were.
Elsewhere against the GTX 680 this is another very good performance for the GTX 980, with a performance advantage over 80%.
On an absolute basis, at these settings you’re looking at an average framerate in the 40s, which for an RTS will be a solid performance.
However when it comes to minimum framerates, GTX 980 can’t quite stay on top. In every case it is ever so slightly edged out by the R9 290XU by a fraction of a frame per second. AMD seems to weather the hardest drops in framerates just a bit better than NVIDIA does. Though neither card can quite hold the line at 30fps at 1440p and 4K.
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takeship - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
The situation we have here now is very reminiscent of AMD's CPU position shortly after Core 2 hit the market. Nvidia now has a product with better performance, better efficiency, better (still) drivers & features, and similar pricing and that puts AMD in a bad way. The 3xx series had better seriously wow, or AMD's GPU division is quickly going to see the same market erosion that happened after Core 2/iCore. Personally, i think this is a knockout blow. - soon to be former 7970 ownerchizow - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
Maxwell is truly amazing stuff. Great advances from Nvidia in virtually every aspect.Not super thrilled about the 980 price at $550, the 970 price however is amazing at $329. I was going to go with the 980 but 2x970s seem more appealing. 970 is 13/16 SMXes but it retains the full 4GB, full 256-bit bus, full 64 ROPs. Hopefully there's a lot of 970s on the full 980 PCBs.
Jensen just confirmed the prices on the Live Stream.
shing3232 - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
they have efficiency advantage because because they use the best 28nm call hpm. they use high performance mobile process of course they are very efficientnkm90 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
From TSMCs website ( http://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/techn... )"The 28nm High Performance Mobile Computing (HPM) provides high performance for mobile applications to address the need for applications requiring high speed. Such technology can provide the highest speed among 28nm technologies. With such higher performance coverage, 28HPM is ideal for many applications from networking, and high-end smartphone/ mobile consumer products."It looks like the hpm process was designed for chips that would dissipate much less than the 150-200W this one does. I seriously doubt someone would use hpm for such high power chips. Also some body had the voltages for the gm204 chip; and the idle voltage was closer to the 0.85V of hp than the 0.9V of HPM
chizow - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
There's no indication they are using 28nm HPM, even the first Maxwell part (GM107) used 28nm HP and alluded to this amazing power/perf ratio we see today with GM104.It is obvious Nvidia's convergence of mobile *design* (not process) fundamentals helped them as we saw with Kepler, and this will only be further beneficial with their mobile Maxwell designs.
Sttm - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
Yeah I was looking at 970 results on other sites... its the 8800gt reborn! Almost top end performance, $220 in savings.chizow - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Yep the 970 is amazing price:perf, Newegg has them at the $330 price up to $350 for some custom/OC versions.I did end up going with a single 980 though. The difference in build quality is just too much and SLI with my new G-Sync monitor (Swift) have had issues with my current 670 SLI build. The scaling with SLI is also not exceptional with these Maxwell cards (~60%), so the improvement of 2x970 is actually not that much over a single highly overclocked 980.
Still amazing job by Nvidia, the 980 would have been a grand slam at $500 but it is still an Earl Weaver 3-run blast at $550.
uzun - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
When will these cards be available via newegg etc?arbit3r - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
i would guess later tonight maybe tomorrow though that might be wrong.chizow - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
They are available on Newegg.com now. Some SKUs are selling out now. I picked up two of the EVGA 980 SuperClocked models.