The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review: Maxwell Mark 2
by Ryan Smith on September 18, 2014 10:30 PM ESTBioshock Infinite
Bioshock Infinite is Irrational Games’ latest entry in the Bioshock franchise. Though it’s based on Unreal Engine 3 – making it our obligatory UE3 game – Irrational had added a number of effects that make the game rather GPU-intensive on its highest settings. As an added bonus it includes a built-in benchmark composed of several scenes, a rarity for UE3 engine games, so we can easily get a good representation of what Bioshock’s performance is like.
Even with advanced depth of field effects, our highest end video cards are starting to run away with Bioshock: Infinite. That is particularly true for the GTX 980, which in a game that NVIDIA frequently does well in further props up the GTX 980’s advantage. Only at 4K are the R9 290XU and GTX 980 anywhere near close, otherwise at 1440p it’s a 37% performance advantage. GTX 780 Ti on the other hand holds much closer, still falling behind the GTX 980 but only by around 5% at sub-4K resolutions. This does make for a good moment for showcasing the GTX 980’s greater ROP throughput though; as we crank up the resolution to 4K, the 780 Ti falls further behind, especially when we’re at lower quality settings that leave us less shader-bound.
On an absolute basis 120Hz/144Hz gamer should have a blast even with a single GTX 980 at 1080p, while purists will need more performance for 1440p than the 85fps the card can offer. And at 4K the GTX 980 is doing very well for itself, almost cracking 60fps at High quality, and becoming the only card to crack 40fps with Ultra quality.
This will be one of the weaker showings for the GTX 980 over the GTX 680 though; at sub-4K resolutions it’s only a 60-65% performance improvement.
Meanwhile Bioshock is the first of 5 games we can reliably measure with the FCAT tools to check for frame pacing consistency. Bioshock is a bit more erratic than most games in this respect, and while our general rule of thumb for an excellent performance from a single card is 3%, our recording for GTX 980 is a bit higher at 3.5%. On the other hand at 4K it measures in at just 2.3%. So while frame pacing is going to be a bit of a rubber stamping process overall, we can confirm that GTX 980 is delivering a good frame pacing experience in Bioshock.
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mesahusa - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
Nvidia and AMD havent moved to 22 because they don't have the funding. Intel has tens of billions to blow away in R&D. Broadwells going to be released in 2015, and its 14nm.Hrel - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
In light of Nvidia not even trying to reduce manufacturing nodes It would be really nice to see them go on the offensive in the price war. $300 for the GTX980, everything lower from there. Probably not now, but like, spring 2015, that'd be great! Make good and sure to wipe out all the hold outs (like myself) keeping their old cards because they still play everything they play on 1080p. Kinda, get all your customers caught up on hardware in the same upgrade time frame.Then when they finally do drop nodes they can focus on making every card they sell run games at 8K resolution.
Nfarce - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Hate to break the news to you, but if you want to game at high level (above 1080p), you need to pay at high level. There is nothing new about that in the entire history of PC enthusiast building and gaming either for those of us who remember making the "huge leap" from a 15" 1024x768 resolution CRT monitor to a whopping 19" 1600x1200 CRT monitor. At least not in the 20 years since I've been involved with it anyway.Besides all that, that's why GPU makers offer cards for different budgets. If you can't afford their top tier products, you can't afford to game top tier. Period and end of discussion.
tuxRoller - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
It seems as though the big improvement nvidia has made is to enable cpu-level scheduling/dvfs granularity into their chip. However, once all cores are engaged it ends up using as much power as its predecessor (see tomshardware).What I really want to know is how much of this due to purely driver-level changes.
yhselp - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
Exceptional design. The sad thing is that NVIDIA will take forever to release a 30 SMM Maxwell GPU and once it finally does, it would cost a ton; even later on when they release a "budget" version for an unreasonable price of around $650 it would be too late - the great performance potential of today wouldn't be so great tomorrow. Striving for and building amazing GPUs is the right way forward, not empowering the people with them is a crime. Whatever happened to $500 flagship products?Rhodie - Wednesday, September 24, 2014 - link
Just got a GTX970, and only latest Nvidia drivers will install for 9xx series cards it seems. Unfortunately the latest drivers totally screw up some programs that use CUDA, seem to hide itspresence from programs lile Xillisoft Video Convertor Ultimate:-/ No response of course from either Nvidia or Xillisoft regarding the problem. Wonder how many other programs the drivers break?
garadante - Thursday, September 25, 2014 - link
Geeze. Anandtech, do an updated best value graphics card list because since the launch of the 970/980 retailers are giving some serious price cuts to 770/780/780 Ti's. Newegg has a 780 for less than $300 after rebate and just a hair over $300 before rebate. I'm seeing 780 Ti's for ~$430 and 770s for ~$240. I am amazed to see price cuts this deep since I haven't seen them the last several generations and considering how overpriced these cards were. But while supplies last and prices hold/drop, this completely flips price/performance on it's head. I feel bad recommending an AMD 290 Tri-X to a friend a couple months back now. xDgaradante - Thursday, September 25, 2014 - link
Please do an updates best value graphics card* Where are my manners! D:jman9295 - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Newegg has an Asus DirectCU II GTX 780 selling in the $290 range after a mail in rebate, promo code and discount. It also comes with a pre-order copy of the new Borderlands game. That has to be the best value to performance GPU out right now. It is almost a full $100 less than the cheapest non-reference R9 290 on newegg and $40 less than the cheapest reference R9 290 which is crazy since this same Asus GTX 780 was selling for over $550 just last month with no free games (and still is on Amazon for some reason).mixer4x - Thursday, September 25, 2014 - link
I feel bad for having just bought the 290 tri-x just a month ago! =(I bought it because you never know when the new cards will be released and how much they will cost. Unfortunately, the new cards came out too soon!