The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Review
by Ryan Smith on May 31, 2015 6:00 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 2015.
Once more we find the GTX 980 Ti and GTX Titan X virtually tied. Across all settings and resolutions the GTX 980 Ti stays within 97-98% of the Titan’s performance. Consequently GTX Titan X is ever so marginally better, but not enough to make any real difference.
This also means that GTX 980 Ti continues with its very strong lead over the GTX 980. Once more we’re looking at a 26-31% performance advantage for the latest member of the GTX 900 series, in-line with its price premium.
Meanwhile on an absolute basis, as one of our most punishing games this is also a good reminder of why even GM200 cards can’t quite pull off high quality 4K gaming with a single GPU today. Even without MSAA and one step below Crysis 3’s Very High quality settings, the GTX 980 Ti can only muster 40.9fps. If you want to get to 60fps you will need to drop to Low quality, or drop the resolution to 1440p. The latter will get you 83.2fps at the same quality settings, which again highlights GTX 980 Ti’s second strength as a good card for driving high refresh rate 1440p displays.
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madwolfa - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
No, it has full access.MapRef41N93W - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
It has the full ROPs. The memory is tied to the ROPs which is why the 970 had it's issue.RaistlinZ - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
Ryan, did you guys fully test the amount of full-speed VRAM on this 980Ti? Is all 6GB running at full speed and not just 5.5GB or some such nonesense? Have you tested actual in game VRAM usage and seen it reach 6GB? Thanks. :)madwolfa - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/206956-nvidia-g... confirmed by nvidia that full memory access is availableo-k - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
that's what they said last time.FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - link
No they didn't say anything and 6 months later...This time they said something beforehand, I'm sure they are lying, so I agree with you.
My tinfoil is failing one moment I'm receiving a transmission from beta reticuli.
Ah yes, it's confirmed, nVidia is lying, again, the memory is hosed on the 980ti...
This message will self destruct in 5 seconds wether or not you've accepted the mission o-k.
Ryan Smith - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
Yep. We've checked."Just to be sure we checked to make sure the ROP/MC configuration of GTX 980 Ti was unchanged at 96 ROPs"
None of the ROP/MC partitions have been disabled, and all 3MB of L2 cache is available.
jjj - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
Makes the 980 a very hard sell even at 499$, they should have dropped it to 449$ or even slightly less. The TI is so much faster and the 970 is so much cheaper.Yojimbo - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
I think it should have been dropped to $250, but that's just me. When price premiums are not linear with performance increases, people complain the higher priced card is overpriced, and when they are, people complain the lower priced card is overpriced. Best solution: All cards $0.jjj - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
I wasn't complaining, i was commenting on their strategy and your childish comment is just inappropriate.