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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kron123456789 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Look at "Load Power Consuption — Furmark" test. It's 80W lower with 980 than with 780Ti.Carrier - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Yes, but the 980's clock is significantly lowered for the FurMark test, down to 923MHz. The TDP should be fairly measured at speeds at which games actually run, 1150-1225MHz, because that is the amount of heat that we need to account for when cooling the system.Ryan Smith - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
It doesn't really matter what the clockspeed is. The card is gated by both power and temperature. It can never draw more than its TDP.FurMark is a pure TDP test. All NVIDIA cards will reach 100% TDP, making it a good way to compare their various TDPs.
Carrier - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
If that is the case, then the charts are misleading. GTX 680 has a 195W TDP vs. GTX 770's 230W (going by Wikipedia), but the 680 uses 10W more in the FurMark test.I eagerly await your GTX 970 report. Other sites say that it barely saves 5W compared to the GTX 980, even after they correct for factory overclock. Or maybe power measurements at the wall aren't meant to be scrutinized so closely :)
Carrier - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
To follow up: in your GTX 770 review from May 2013, you measured the 680 at 332W in FurMark, and the 770 at 383W in FurMark. Those numbers seem more plausible.Ryan Smith - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
680 is a bit different because it's a GPU Boost 1.0 card. 2.0 included the hard TDP and did away with separate power targets. Actually what you'll see is that GTX 680 wants to draw 115% TDP with NVIDIA's current driver set under FurMark.Carrier - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
Thank you for the clarification.wanderer27 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Power at the wall (AC) is going to be different than power at the GPU - which is coming from the DC PSU.There are loses and efficiency difference in converting from AC to DC (PSU), plus a little wiggle from MB and so forth.
solarscreen - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Here you go:http://books.google.com/books?id=v3-1hVwHnHwC&...
PhilJ - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
As stated in the article, the power figures are total system power draw. The GTX980 is throwing out nearly double the FPS of the GTX680, so this is causing the rest of the system (mostly the CPU) to work harder to feed the card. This in tun drives the total system power consumption up, despite the fact the GTX980 itself is drawing less power than the GTX680.