The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review: Maxwell Mark 2

Crysis: Warhead

Up next is our legacy title for 2014, Crysis: Warhead. The stand-alone expansion to 2007’s Crysis, at over 5 years old Crysis: Warhead can still beat most systems down. Crysis was intended to be future-looking as far as performance and visual quality goes, and it has clearly achieved that. We’ve only finally reached the point where single-GPU cards have come out that can hit 60fps at 1920 with 4xAA, never mind 2560 and beyond.

At the launch of the GTX 680, Crysis: Warhead was rather punishing of the GTX 680’s decreased memory bandwidth versus GTX 580. The GTX 680 was faster than the GTX 580, but the gains weren’t as great as what we saw elsewhere. For this reason the fact that the GTX 980 can hold a 60% lead over the GTX 680 is particularly important because it means that NVIDIA’s 3^rd generation delta color compression is working and working well. This has allowed NVIDIA to overcome quite a bit of memory bandwidth bottlenecking in this game and push performance higher.

That said, since GTX 780 Ti has a full 50% more memory bandwidth, it’s telling that GTX 780 Ti and GTX 980 are virtually tied in this benchmark. Crysis: Warhead will gladly still take what memory bandwidth it can get from NVIDIA cards.

Otherwise against AMD cards this is the other game where GTX 980 can’t cleanly defeat R9 290XU. These cards are virtually tied, with AMD edging out NVIDIA in two of three tests. Given their differing architectures I’m hesitant to say this is a memory bandwidth factor as well, but if it were then R9 290XU has a very big memory bandwidth advantage going into this.

When it comes to minimum framerates the story is much the same, with the GTX 980 and AMD trading places. Though it’s interesting to note that the GTX 980 is doing rather well against the GTX 680 here; that memory bandwidth advantage would appear to really be paying off with minimum framterates.