The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Review
by Ryan Smith on May 31, 2015 6:00 PM ESTGrand Theft Auto V
The final game in our review of the GTX 980 Ti is our most recent addition, Grand Theft Auto V. The latest edition of Rockstar’s venerable series of open world action games, Grand Theft Auto V was originally released to the last-gen consoles back in 2013. However thanks to a rather significant facelift for the current-gen consoles and PCs, along with the ability to greatly turn up rendering distances and add other features like MSAA and more realistic shadows, the end result is a game that is still among the most stressful of our benchmarks when all of its features are turned up. Furthermore, in a move rather uncharacteristic of most open world action games, Grand Theft Auto also includes a very comprehensive benchmark mode, giving us a great chance to look into the performance of an open world action game.
On a quick note about settings, as Grand Theft Auto V doesn't have pre-defined settings tiers, I want to quickly note what settings we're using. For "Very High" quality we have all of the primary graphics settings turned up to their highest setting, with the exception of grass, which is at its own very high setting. Meanwhile 4x MSAA is enabled for direct views and reflections. This setting also involves turning on some of the advanced redering features - the game's long shadows, high resolution shadows, and high definition flight streaming - but it not increasing the view distance any further.
Otherwise for "High" quality we take the same basic settings but turn off all MSAA, which significantly reduces the GPU rendering and VRAM requirements.
After initially expecting Grand Theft Auto to be a walk in the park performance wise, the PC version of the game has instead turned out to be a very demanding games for our GPUs. Even at 1440p we can’t have very high quality with MSAA and still crack 60fps, though we can get very close.
Ultimately GTA doesn’t do any better than any other game in setting apart our GM200 cards. GTX 980 Ti trails GTX Titan by 4% or less, essentially the average outcome at this point. Also average is the GTX 980 Ti’s lead over the GTX 980, with the newest card beating the older GTX 980 by 29-31% across our three settings. Finally, against the GTX 780 the GTX 980 Ti has another strong showing, with a 69-79% lead.
On an absolute basis we can see that at 4K we can’t have 4x MSAA and even crack 30fps on a single-GPU card, with GTX 980 Ti topping out at 27.8 fps. Taking out MSAA brings us up to 46.2fps, which is still well off 60fps, but also well over the 30fps cap that this game was originally designed against on the last-generation consoles.
Along with an all-around solid benchmark scene, the other interesting benchmarking feature of GTA is that it also generates frame percentiles on its own, allowing us to see the percentiles without going back and recording the game with FRAPS. Taking a look at the 99th percentile in this case, what we find is that at each setting GTA crushes some group of cards due to a lack of VRAM.
At 4K very high quality, 4GB cards have just enough VRAM to stay alive, with the multi-GPU R9 295X2 getting crushed due to the additional VRAM requirements of AFR pushing it over the edge. Not plotted here are the 3GB cards, which saw their framerates plummet to the low single-digits, essentially struggling to complete this benchmark. Meanwhile 1440p at high quality crushes our 2GB cards, with less VRAM than a Radeon HD 7970 falling off of the cliff.
As for what this means for the GTX 980 Ti, the situation finds the GTX 980 Ti trailing the GTX Titan X in 99th percentile framerates by anywhere between 3% and 10%. This test is not designed to push more than 6GB of VRAM, so I’m not entirely convinced this isn’t a wider than normal variance (especially at the low framerates for 4K), though the significant and rapid asset streaming this benchmark requires may be taking its toll on the GTX 980 Ti, which has less VRAM for additional caching.
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RaistlinZ - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
What more would a review of the 960 tell you that you don't already know, honestly? I'd rather read reviews about interesting products like the 980Ti. People need to let the 960 review go already, geez.Michael Bay - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
I only trust AT numbers and am in no hurry to upgrade.God I wish they would compare Baytrail/Cherrytrail to i3s.
Brett Howse - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
I did compare Cherry Trail to the i3 SP3 in the Surface 3 review. Was there more you were looking for?Michael Bay - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
I`m trying to get a cheap small notebook for my father. He is currently on i3-380UM and the choice is between N3558 and i3-4030U. Workload is strictly internet browsing/ms office.Not much point in changing anything if performance is going to be worse than it was...
sandy105 - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Exactly , it would be interesting to see how much faster than baytrail they are ?DanNeely - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
DVI may be an obsolescent standard at this point; but 4/5k gaming is still expensive enough that a lot of the people buying into it now are ones who're upgrading from older 2560x1600 displays that don't do DP/HDMI 2. A lot of those people will probably keep using their old monitor as a secondary display after getting a new higher resolution one (I know I plan to); and good DL-DVI to display port adapters are still relatively expensive at ~$70. (There're cheaper ones; but they've all got lots of bad reviews from people who found they weren't operating reliably and were generating display artifacts: messed up scan lines.) Unless it dies first, I'd like to be able to keep using my existing NEC 3090 for a few more years without having to spend money on an expensive dongle.YazX_ - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
Dude, majority are still playing on 1920x1080 and just few now are making the leap to 2560x1440p, i have been gaming on 1440p since two years and not planning to go 4k anytime soon since hardware still not mature enough to play at 4k comfortably with single video card.thus, DVI is not going anywhere since dual layer DVI supports 1440p and probably most of 1080p gamers are using DVI unless if they have G-Sync or want to use Adaptive V-Sync then they have to use DP, and dont forget that there are too many people who bought 27" Korean 1440 monitors that doesnt have except DVI ports.
DanNeely - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
If you're playing at 1920/60hz this card's massive overkill, and in any event it's a non-issue for you because your monitor is only using a single link in the DVI and you can use a dirt cheap passive DVI-HDMI/DP adapter now; and worst case would only need a cheap single link adapter in the future.My comment was directed toward Ryan's comment on page 2 (near the bottom, above the last picture) suggesting that the DVI port wasn't really needed since any monitor it could drive wouldn't need this much horse power to run games.
FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - link
totally disagree - I game at 1920x1200, the only rez the 980ti is capable of without knocking down the eye candy.Kutark - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Exactly. I literally just now upgraded to a 1440p monitor, and i can't even express in words how little of a sh*t i give about 4k gaming. Ive been a hardware nerd for a long time, but when i got into home theater i learned just how much resolution actually matters. 4k is overkill for a 120" projected image at a 15' seating distance. 4k at normal desk viewing distances is way beyond overkill. They've done tests on fighter pilots who have ridiculous vision, like 20/7.5 and such, and even they can't see a difference at those seating distances. 4k is almost as much of a marketing BS gimmick than 3D was for tv's.Anyways im clearly getting angry. But point still stands, every single gamer i know is still on 1080p, i was the first to splurge on a 1440p monitor. And now its put me into a position where my SLI'd 760's aren't really doing the deed, especially being 2gb cards. So, 980ti fits the bill for my gsync 144hz 1440p monitor just about perfectly.