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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Frenetic Pony - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
This is the most likely thing to happen, as the transition to 14nm takes place for intel over the next 6 months those 22nm fabs will sit empty. They could sell capacity at a similar process to TSMC's latest while keeping their advantage at the same time.nlasky - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Intel uses the same Fabs to produce 14nm as it does to produce 22nmlefty2 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
I can see Nvidia switching to Intel's 14nm, however Intel charges a lot more than TSMC for it's foundry services (because they want to maintain their high margins). That would mean it's only economical for the high end cardsSeanJ76 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
What a joke!!!! 980GTX doesn't even beat the previous year's 780ti??? LOL!! Think I'll hold on to my 770 SC ACX Sli that EVGA just sent me for free!!Margalus - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
uhh, what review were you looking at? or are you dyslexic and mixed up the results between the two cards?eanazag - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Nvidia would get twice as many GPUs per wafer on a 14nm process than 28nm. Maxwell at 14nm would blow Intel integrated and AMD out of the water in performance and power usage.That simply isn't the reality. Samsung has better than 28nm processes also. This type of partnership would work well for Nvidia and AMD to partner with Samsung on their fabs. It makes more sense than Intel because Intel views Nvidia as a threat and competitor. There are reasons GPUs are still on 28nm and it is beyond process availability.
astroidea - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
They'd actually get four times more since you have to considered the squared area. 14^2*4=28^2emn13 - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
Unfortunately, that's not how it works. A 14nm process isn't simply a 28nm process scaled by 0.5; different parts are scaled differently, and so the overall die area savings aren't that simple to compute.In a sense, the concept of a "14nm" process is almost a bit of a marketing term, since various components may still be much larger than 14nm. And of course, the same holds for TSMC's 28nm process... so a true comparison would require more knowledge that you or I have, I'm sure :-) - I'm not sure if intel even releases the precise technical details of how things are scaled in the first place.
bernstein - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
no because intel is using their 22nm for haswell parts... the cpu transition ends in a year with the broadwell xeon-ep... at which point almost all the fabs will either be upgraded or upgrading to 14nm and the rest used to produce chipsets and other secondary die'snlasky - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
yes but they use the same fabs for both processes