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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bernstein - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
it's nice having one article with a full review, & it's nice to have early partial results... so in the future if publishing with missing content PLZ put in a big fat bold disclaimer:xyz content missing, update coming on 2.2.2222
chizow - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
@Ryan, thanks for the update, sorry I just scanned through and didn't see the subtext mentioning your issues with the 970. Looking forward to updated results once you get some good samples.nevertell - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
You can't read through the article in one sitting yet you complain about the article being rushed ?chizow - Sunday, September 21, 2014 - link
@nevertell, not sure if that comment was directed at me, but I never read through the entire article in the first sitting, especially in this case where I was actually in the market to buy one of these cards and might need to make a quick buying decision. I generally look at results and jump around a bit before going back to read the entire article, and I did not see any subtext on why the 970 wasn't included on this page about "Launching Today":http://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-...
I expected to see something about why the 970 wasn't launching today, staggered launch, didn't get review sample etc but did not see anything, so I asked bc I saw Ryan was attending the comments here and might get a quick response.
boot318 - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
Bye, AMD!Amazing card(s) Nvidia bought to market! I've already seen a couple of reviews showing this monster overclocking over 1450+. Just think about when Nvidia drops a big die version........ :)
dragonsqrrl - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
AMD is by no means out of it. They're still very competitive in terms of performance, however they're far behind in terms of efficiency, which means to compete with the 980 they'll likely have to launch a far higher TDP card that requires more exotic cooling and will almost certainly be more expensive to manufacture. Even when you take the 285 into consideration, which offers 280 level performance at greatly reduced TDP, it's still at a higher TDP then the 980 which now outperforms the 290X by ~15%. And this isn't even taking noise, build quality, or features into consideration... Not a good position for AMD, in fact it's somewhat reminiscent of their processors (minus the competitive performance part)."Just think about when Nvidia drops a big die version........ :)"
Fortunately for AMD that's just not going to happen on 28nm, otherwise I might be inclined to agree with you. They still have a very real competitive chance with their upcoming cards.
arbit3r - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
O god really? 285 has greately reduced TDP? um 280 had a 200watt TDP, the 285 is 190, 10 watts less i wouldn't call that greatly reduced. Before you say 280 had 250watt tdp, no that is the 280x.dragonsqrrl - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
I haven't done much searching around, but according to Anandtech's review of the 285, the 280 has a 250W TDP.http://www.anandtech.com/show/8460/amd-radeon-r9-2...
arbit3r - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
plenty sites i know of say its 200, so if there is that much misinfo then likely AMD at fault for that one. Seeing a lot of reviews put real world power usage around 20watts difference.Ryan Smith - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
For the record, 250W for R9 280 comes directly from AMD's reviewer's guide for that product.