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%.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
274 Comments
View All Comments
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.