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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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.