The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Review
by Ryan Smith on May 31, 2015 6:00 PM ESTBattlefield 4
Kicking off our benchmark suite is Battlefield 4, DICE’s 2013 multiplayer military shooter. After a rocky start, Battlefield 4 has since become a challenging game in its own right and a showcase title for low-level graphics APIs. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, based on our experiences our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, which means a card needs to be able to average at least 60fps if it’s to be able to hold up in multiplayer.
Battlefield 4 is going to set the pace for the rest of this review. In our introduction we talked about how the GTX 980 Ti may as well be the GTX Titan X, and this is one such example why. With a framerate deficit of no more than 3% in this benchmark, the difference between the two cards is just outside the range of standard run-to-run experimental variation that we see in our benchmarking process. So yes, it really is that fast.
In any case, after stripping away the Frostbite engine’s expensive (and not wholly effective) MSAA, what we’re left with for BF4 at 4K with Ultra quality puts the 980 Ti in a pretty good light. At 56.5fps it’s not quite up to the 60fps mark, but it comes very close, close enough that the GTX 980 Ti should be able to stay above 30fps virtually the entire time, and never drop too far below 30fps in even the worst case scenario. Alternatively, dropping to Medium quality should give the card plenty of headroom, with an average framerate of 91.8fps meaning even the lowest framerate never drops below 45fps.
Meanwhile our other significant comparison here is the GTX 980, which just saw its price cut by $50 to $499 to make room for the GTX 980 Ti. At $649 the GTX 980 Ti ideally should be 30% faster to justify its 30% higher price tag; here it’s almost exactly on that mark, fluctuating between a 28% and 32% lead depending on the resolution and settings.
Finally, shifting gears for a moment, gamers looking for the ultimate 1440p card will not be disappointed. GTX 980 Ti will not get to 120fps here (it won’t even come close), but at 77.7fps it’s well suited for driving 1440p144 displays. In fact and GTX Titan X are the single-GPU cards to do better than 60fps at this resolution.
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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