The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review: Maxwell Mark 2
by Ryan Smith on September 18, 2014 10:30 PM ESTMetro: Last Light
As always, kicking off our look at performance is 4A Games’ latest entry in their Metro series of subterranean shooters, Metro: Last Light. The original Metro: 2033 was a graphically punishing game for its time and Metro: Last Light is in its own right too. On the other hand it scales well with resolution and quality settings, so it’s still playable on lower end hardware.
As has become customary for us for the last couple of high-end video card reviews, we’re going to be running all of our 4K video card benchmarks at both high quality and at a lower quality level. In practice not even GTX 980 is going to be fast enough to comfortably play most of these games at 3840x2160 with everything cranked up – that is going to be multi-GPU territory – so for that reason we’re including a lower quality setting to showcase just what performance looks like at settings more realistic for a single GPU.
GTX 980 comes out swinging in our first set of benchmarks. If there was any doubt that it could surpass the likes of R9 290XU and GTX 780 Ti, then this first benchmark is a great place to set those doubts to rest. At all resolutions and quality settings it comes out on top, surpassing NVIDIA’s former consumer flagship by anywhere from a few percent to 12% at 4K with high quality settings. Otherwise against the R9 290XU it’s a consistent 13% lead at 2560 and 4K Medium.
In absolute terms this is enough performance to keep its average framerates well over 60fps at 2560, and even at 3840 Medium it comes just short of crossing the 60fps mark. High quality mode will take the wind out of GTX 980’s sails though, pushing framerates back into the borderline 30fps range.
Looking at NVIDIA’s last-generation parts for a moment, the performance gains over the lower tier GK110 based GTX 780 are around 25-35%. This is about where you’d expect to see a new GTX x80 card given NVIDIA’s quasi-regular 2 year performance upgrade cadence. And when extended out to a full 2 years, the performance advantage over GTX 680 is anywhere between 60% and 92% depending on the resolution we’re looking at. NVIDIA proclaims that GTX 980 will achieve 2x the performance per watt of GTX 680, and since GTX 980 is designed to operate at a lower TDP than GTX 680, as we can see it means performance over GTX 680 won’t quite be doubled in most cases.
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Ryan Smith - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
As noted in the article, we had a problem with our 970 sample that was not able to be resolved in time for this article. Otherwise I would have very much liked to have a 970 in this review.Sunrise089 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
"Focus on quality first, then timeliness second. There's value in both but there's more value in one." :(extide - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Yeah guys, seriously just make the article live a little bit late!hpglow - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
The boss quits and all you guys around running around the office with your shirts off screaming at the top of your lungs? The review could have waited and hour or two so that it was done, now I'm not even going to finish reading it.iLovefloss - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
They've been doing this since forever. If you look at the comments from the R9 290X launch review, people were complaining about the same thing for example.Sunrise089 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Including me. It was unacceptable clIck-baiting then and it still is. Interestingly enough it's not a site-wide issue. Surface Pro 3 and Devils Canyon both had long waits for ultimately excellent reviews. iPhone 6 will no doubt be a very popular review and yet Joshua or whoever didn't push it online at midnight. For whatever reason though GPU reviews get this weird 'rush to publish, fill in content later' pattern.djscrew - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
diva much? jeez give it a restnathanddrews - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
This is not the first time AT has done this, there have been many other incomplete reviews published over the years (decades).chizow - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
@hpglow, in Ryan's defense, it was a short turnaround from the press briefing and this has happened in the past. Usually AT's articles focus heavily on the technical aspects also (which is greatly appreciated throughout the industry) and he also gets help from the rest of the staff to stitch the review together, so it is understandable that it is sometimes uploaded piecemeal.I would rather have something that is eventually updated that stands the test of time, vs. something that is rushed out hastily.
SodaAnt - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
You think that it would only take an hour or two to get a gpu somehow, run dozens of tests on it, put those tests into tables, put those tables onto pages, then write another few thousand words on those tests?