The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Review
by Ryan Smith on May 31, 2015 6:00 PM ESTFar Cry 4
The next game in our 2015 GPU benchmark suite is Far Cry 4, Ubisoft’s Himalayan action game. A lot like Crysis 3, Far Cry 4 can be quite tough on GPUs, especially with Ultra settings thanks to the game’s expansive environments.
For those of you just joining us, the GTX 980 Ti and GTX Titan are still neck-and neck. The GTX 980 Ti trails the Titan by no more than 4%, at 1440p and 2560, with the two cards taking the top two spots in our charts for single-GPU cards as one would expect.
On an absolute basis, at 4K Ultra this happens to be another case where the GTX 980 Ti delivers framerates around 40fps, in this case coming in at 40.6fps. Otherwise the GTX 980 Ti is going to come up a hair short of 60fps at medium quality – hitting 59.5fps – and finally going over 70fps at 1440p Ultra.
This also ends up being another case where the GTX 980 Ti looks very good as compared to the GTX 780. Here it beats NVIDIA’s last $649 card by as much as 86% at 1440p, highlighting NVIDIA’s performance gains at this price point over the last 2 years.
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Daroller - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
HAHAHAHAHA website lagged out and triple posted. That's awesome. Go go Google Chrome!naxeem - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
I don't think it is all good with the overclocking part. On stock air (albeit 80% fan speed unless used Accelero IV at 40%) cooler TitanX cards easily get to 1300/1440 normal/boost clocks. Same cards on water got to 1375/1500 with cool-ish 55°C at max load. That applies to two TitanX in SLI with modified BIOS that allows for more power consumption and thus removes artificial limit.Since the chip is identical and 980Ti is actually partially defective TitanX with 50% less RAM and switched off defective parts, I highly doubt clock potential differs, especially not in favor of 980Ti.
I would and do expect 980Ti to clock the same as Titan X (loosing some on chip quality, gaining some on half the VRAM).
FlushedBubblyJock - Saturday, June 13, 2015 - link
Nope. Other test sites show the opposite - 980TI is an overclock monster and beats the TXtruongpham - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Ryan, can you bench this one with Windows 10 and DX12?Ryan Smith - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
We won't be doing any complete Win10 benchmarking until that OS is finished and released. As for DX12, there are no games out yet that re using it; the handful of benchmarks are focused tech demos.cknobman - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Nvidia must have seen some undisclosed AMD benchmarks, went into panic mode, and rushed a release for the 980TI to get customers before the AMD launch.While its a great card the problem is Nvidia screwed some of their own customers.
I take this as a sign that whatever AMD is coming out with must be pretty good. :)
galta - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Maybe, but it could prove to be of little importance.You see, Win10 will be out on June 29th. Realistically speaking, DX12 games won't be real before Christmas or 2016.
It is more than enough time for a possible counterstrike from nVidia.
Having said that, unless one really really needs to upgrade now I would strongly recommend waiting for another month, just to check what Fiji is up to.
As of me, I have a pair of 980GTX Strix and have been with nVidia for a while, but I really hope AMD gets this one right.
Real competition is always good.
JayFiveAlive - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
I've been waiting for this beast to drop... now to decide whether it's a good time to bite.Current setup is a 2500K OC to 4.4Ghz and a GTX 670, so kinda oldish... Was considering upgrading to a Skylake proc come Sept and this 980 Ti, but probably Gigabyte variant... hmmm.
Peichen - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Why upgrade CPU? 2500K at 4.4GHz is still very fast and shouldn't affect performance of a 980Ti much. Maybe 10% less fps vs if you have a 6-core Extreme but why spend $300-400 to get 10% improvement?mapesdhs - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link
Plus if he does need some more CPU oomph, just put in a 2700K. I've built six so far, every one of them happily runs at 5GHz with just a decent air cooler & one fan for quiet operation, though for final setups I use an H80 and two quiet fans. Some games will benefit from more than 4 cores, depends on the game (eg. PvP online FPS can involve a lot of host side scripting, eg. Project Reality, and the upcoming Squad).True though, 2500K is still very potent, just built a 4.8 setup for a friend. She lives on an island, it'll probably be the quickest system for miles around. :D