The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review: Maxwell Mark 2
by Ryan Smith on September 18, 2014 10:30 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 2014.
Meanwhile delta percentage performance is extremely strong here. Everyone, including the GTX 980, is well below 3%.
Always a punishing game, Crysis 3 ends up being one of the only games the GTX 980 doesn’t take a meaningful lead on over the GTX 780 Ti. To be clear the GTX 980 wins in most of these benchmarks, but not in all of them, and even when it does win the GTX 780 Ti is never far behind. For this reason the GTX 980’s lead over the GTX 780 Ti and the rest of our single-GPU video cards is never more than a few percent, even at 4K. Otherwise at 1440p we’re looking at the tables being turned, with the GTX 980 taking a 3% deficit. This is the only time the GTX 980 will lose to NVIDIA’s previous generation consumer flagship.
As for the comparison versus AMD’s cards, NVIDIA has been doing well in Crysis 3 and that extends to the GTX 980 as well. The GTX 980 takes a 10-20% lead over the R9 290XU depending on the resolution, with its advantage shrinking as the resolution grows. During the launch of the R9 290 series we saw that AMD tended to do better than NVIDIA at higher resolutions, and while this pattern has narrowed some, it has not gone away. AMD is still the most likely to pull even with the GTX 980 at 4K resolutions, despite the additional ROPS available to the GTX 980.
This will also be the worst showing for the GTX 980 relative to the GTX 680. GTX 980 is still well in the lead, but below 4K that lead is just 44%. NVIDIA can’t even do 50% better than the GTX 680 in this game until we finally push the GTX 680 out of its comfort zone at 4K.
All of this points to Crysis 3 being very shader limited at these settings. NVIDIA has significantly improved their CUDA core occupancy on Maxwell, but in these extreme situations GTX 980 will still struggle with the CUDA core deficit versus GK110, or the limited 33% increase in CUDA cores versus GTX 680. Which is a feather in Kepler’s cap if anything, showing that it’s not entirely outclassed if given a workload that maps well to its more ILP-sensitive shader architecture.
The delta percentage story continues to be unremarkable with Crysis 3. GTX 980 does technically fare a bit worse, but it’s still well under 3%. Keep in mind that delta percentages do become more sensitive at higher framerates (there is less absolute time to pace frames), so a slight increase here is not unexpected.
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ppi - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
AMD will not beat 980 (they probably could put some fight, but nVidia could always defend it easily, so why do that - it would just dilute prices). What is more important for them, that *on desktop*, AMD can still stay relevant in lower price buckets by offering more performance per $ (while relying on partners for custom open-air cooling and ignoring the power draw disadvantage).Kjella - Sunday, September 21, 2014 - link
You do realize what you said pretty much exactly mirrors what people said about AMD and CPUs a few years back? Just trying to offer value while your competitor is making more efficient chips is a dead end where you're soon so far behind in technology that it's not enough. Nobody wants a 220W CPU (FX-9370/9590) and if AMD needs to pull a 300+W GPU to compete with GTX 980 it'll be equally dead on arrival.ppi - Sunday, September 21, 2014 - link
Not really. When Core2 was released, pretty much entire AMD's lineup was made irrelevant (I still use my 7 years old mid-range Core2Duo and I know that AMD chips were not even for consideration back then). Now the fastest AMD's card is faster than 2nd fastest nVidia offering. Look at TR 2014 HW survey where 80% clearly enthusiasts buy stuff for less than $400. Die sizes are similar. Both companies are fabless and thus have access to the same processes (unlike competition with Intel).AMD of course HAS TO come up with something better than what they have now. And soon. My point was mainly that they should be able to survive this holiday season sort of okayish.
I expect that AMD is focusing their limited resources on 20nm part, but it apparently did not work as well as it did in times of HD-5000 and 7000 series. And Maxwell improvements are greater than what is achievable just with die shrink. So there's some hard work for AMD ahead. Given necessary lead time for such products, I doubt 300-series will be good enough (unless they were going nuts with efficiency after seeing 680).
I admire nVidia for a long time always covering weak spots in their products. It could be seen from times when they went against 3dfx, though FX-5000 and now of course they show how they learned from 480 era.
Silma - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
I fully agree.As long as Intel does not succeed better in smartphones & tablets, it probably doesn't fully utilize its manufacturing capacities.
It could begin with opening 22 nm to NVIDIA and 14nm in 2015.
Seriously though, I'm not sure why Intel still hasn't bought NVIDIA, except if it foresees troubles getting the deal accepted with regulators.
This would not Mirror the AMD's ATI acquisition. crap + crap = crap.
Outstanding + outstanding = awesome.
Notmyusualid - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
+1SanX - Sunday, September 21, 2014 - link
Intel should buy NVIDIA long ago but they are in lethargy all last dacadeRyan Smith - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
BTW, before anyone asks: we're still working to get images and charts in. 4 days is very little time for a 20K word article. So please hold on for a bit.boot318 - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
Where is the Overclocking results? Not done yet? I see the page but it is blank.RaistlinZ - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
Ditto. I can't see the overclocking page.chizow - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
And no 970 results?