The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review: Maxwell Mark 2
by Ryan Smith on September 18, 2014 10:30 PM ESTMetro: Last Light
As always, kicking off our look at performance is 4A Games’ latest entry in their Metro series of subterranean shooters, Metro: Last Light. The original Metro: 2033 was a graphically punishing game for its time and Metro: Last Light is in its own right too. On the other hand it scales well with resolution and quality settings, so it’s still playable on lower end hardware.
As has become customary for us for the last couple of high-end video card reviews, we’re going to be running all of our 4K video card benchmarks at both high quality and at a lower quality level. In practice not even GTX 980 is going to be fast enough to comfortably play most of these games at 3840x2160 with everything cranked up – that is going to be multi-GPU territory – so for that reason we’re including a lower quality setting to showcase just what performance looks like at settings more realistic for a single GPU.
GTX 980 comes out swinging in our first set of benchmarks. If there was any doubt that it could surpass the likes of R9 290XU and GTX 780 Ti, then this first benchmark is a great place to set those doubts to rest. At all resolutions and quality settings it comes out on top, surpassing NVIDIA’s former consumer flagship by anywhere from a few percent to 12% at 4K with high quality settings. Otherwise against the R9 290XU it’s a consistent 13% lead at 2560 and 4K Medium.
In absolute terms this is enough performance to keep its average framerates well over 60fps at 2560, and even at 3840 Medium it comes just short of crossing the 60fps mark. High quality mode will take the wind out of GTX 980’s sails though, pushing framerates back into the borderline 30fps range.
Looking at NVIDIA’s last-generation parts for a moment, the performance gains over the lower tier GK110 based GTX 780 are around 25-35%. This is about where you’d expect to see a new GTX x80 card given NVIDIA’s quasi-regular 2 year performance upgrade cadence. And when extended out to a full 2 years, the performance advantage over GTX 680 is anywhere between 60% and 92% depending on the resolution we’re looking at. NVIDIA proclaims that GTX 980 will achieve 2x the performance per watt of GTX 680, and since GTX 980 is designed to operate at a lower TDP than GTX 680, as we can see it means performance over GTX 680 won’t quite be doubled in most cases.
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garadante - Thursday, September 25, 2014 - link
Yeah. To be honest nobody except ardent Nvidia fanboys would've believed Nvidia would release cards as performance and price competitive as they did, especially the 970. The 980 is honestly a little overpriced compared to a few generations ago as they'll slap a $200 premium on it for Big Maxwell but $330 MSRP for the 970 (if I remember correctly) wasn't bad at all, for generally what, 290/780/290X performance?tuxRoller - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
It's not too surprising as we saw what the 750ti was like.What is disappointing, though, is that I thought nvidia had made some fundamental breakthrough in their designs where, instead, it looks as though they "simply" enabled a better governor.
garadante - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
It'll be interesting to see how the efficiency suffers once nvidia releases a proper compute die with area dedicated to double precision FP. I have to keep in mind that when factoring in the stripped down die compared to AMD's 290/290X cards, the results aren't as competition. Lowing as they first seem. But if AMD can't counter these cards with their own stripped down gaming only cards then nvidia took the win this generation.tuxRoller - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
That's an excellent point. I take it you already read the tomshardware review? They're compute performance/W is still good, but not so unbelievable as their gaming performance, but I'm not sure it's b/c this is a gaming only card. Regardless, though, amd needs to offer something better than what's currently available. Unfortunately, I don't think they will be able to do it. There was a lot of driver work than went into making these maxwell cards humgaradante - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
One thing that really bothers me though is how Anandtech keeps testing the 290/290X with reference cards. Those cards run at 95 C due to the fan control profile in the BIOS and I remember seeing that when people ran those cards with decent nonreference cooling in the 70 C range that power consumption was 15-20+ watts lower. So an AMD die that sacrifices FP64 performance to focus on FP32(gaming, some compute) performance as well as decreasing die size due to the lack of FP64 resources seems like it could be a lot more competitive with Maxwell than people are making it out to be. I have this feeling that the people saying how badly Maxwell trounces AMD's efficiency and that AMD can't possibly hope to catch up are too biased in their thinking.tuxRoller - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
Do you have a link to those reviews that show non-reference fans make gpus more efficient? I don't know how that could be possible. Given the temps we're looking at the effects on the conductors should be very, very small.Regarding the reduction in fp performance and gaming efficiency, that's a good point. That may indeed be part of the reason why nvidia has the gaming/compute split (aside from the prices they can charge).
garadante - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
Here's an example of a card with liquid cooling. Factor in the overclock that the nonreference card has and that it draws something like 20 watts less in Furmark and the same in 3Dmark. I could be mistaken on the improved power usage but I do recall seeing shortly after the 290X launch that nonreference coolers helped immensely, and power usage dropped as well. Sadly I don't believe Anandtech ever reviewed a nonreference 290X... which is mind boggling to consider, considering how much nonreference cooling helped that card, even outside of any potential power usage decreases.garadante - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/lcs-axr9-290x-... Whoops, forgot the link.jman9295 - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
I wonder why they still give these cards these boring numbered names like GTX 980. Except for the Titan, these names kinda suck. Why not at least name it the Maxwell 980 or for AMD's R( 290 series the Hawaii 290. That sounds a lot cooler than GTX or R9. Also, for the last several generations, AMD and Nvidia's numbering system seems to be similar up until AMD ended that with the R9/R7 200 series. Before that, they had the GTX 700 and HD 7000 series, the GTX 600 and HD 6000 series and so on. Then, as soon as AMD changed it up, Nvidia decides to skip the GTX 800's for retail desktop GPUs and jump right up to the 900 series. Maybe they will come up with a fancier name for their next gen cards besides the GTX 1000's.AnnonymousCoward - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
Naw, names are much harder to keep track of than numbers that inherently describe relative performance.