The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review: Maxwell Mark 2
by Ryan Smith on September 18, 2014 10:30 PM ESTCrysis 3
Still one of our most punishing benchmarks, Crysis 3 needs no introduction. With Crysis 3, Crytek has gone back to trying to kill computers and still holds “most punishing shooter” title in our benchmark suite. Only in a handful of setups can we even run Crysis 3 at its highest (Very High) settings, and that’s still without AA. Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to drive games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2014.
Meanwhile delta percentage performance is extremely strong here. Everyone, including the GTX 980, is well below 3%.
Always a punishing game, Crysis 3 ends up being one of the only games the GTX 980 doesn’t take a meaningful lead on over the GTX 780 Ti. To be clear the GTX 980 wins in most of these benchmarks, but not in all of them, and even when it does win the GTX 780 Ti is never far behind. For this reason the GTX 980’s lead over the GTX 780 Ti and the rest of our single-GPU video cards is never more than a few percent, even at 4K. Otherwise at 1440p we’re looking at the tables being turned, with the GTX 980 taking a 3% deficit. This is the only time the GTX 980 will lose to NVIDIA’s previous generation consumer flagship.
As for the comparison versus AMD’s cards, NVIDIA has been doing well in Crysis 3 and that extends to the GTX 980 as well. The GTX 980 takes a 10-20% lead over the R9 290XU depending on the resolution, with its advantage shrinking as the resolution grows. During the launch of the R9 290 series we saw that AMD tended to do better than NVIDIA at higher resolutions, and while this pattern has narrowed some, it has not gone away. AMD is still the most likely to pull even with the GTX 980 at 4K resolutions, despite the additional ROPS available to the GTX 980.
This will also be the worst showing for the GTX 980 relative to the GTX 680. GTX 980 is still well in the lead, but below 4K that lead is just 44%. NVIDIA can’t even do 50% better than the GTX 680 in this game until we finally push the GTX 680 out of its comfort zone at 4K.
All of this points to Crysis 3 being very shader limited at these settings. NVIDIA has significantly improved their CUDA core occupancy on Maxwell, but in these extreme situations GTX 980 will still struggle with the CUDA core deficit versus GK110, or the limited 33% increase in CUDA cores versus GTX 680. Which is a feather in Kepler’s cap if anything, showing that it’s not entirely outclassed if given a workload that maps well to its more ILP-sensitive shader architecture.
The delta percentage story continues to be unremarkable with Crysis 3. GTX 980 does technically fare a bit worse, but it’s still well under 3%. Keep in mind that delta percentages do become more sensitive at higher framerates (there is less absolute time to pace frames), so a slight increase here is not unexpected.
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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.