The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 performance review

Gaming benchmarks

3DMark 2013 Results

First off was the 3DMark (2013) Fire Strike benchmark, which is made up of two tests; Fire Strike and Fire Strike Extreme that put the grapihcs cards through their paces, with extreme levels of tessellation and volumetric illumination, as well as complex smoke simulation using compute shaders and dynamic particle illumination.

The Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti Windforce 3x OC card took the top spot for both tests; however, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 was trailing right behind the winner. Although the new GM204 GPU of the GTX 980 boasts of higher clock speeds (1126MHz for its base clock; boost clock speed of 1216MHz) than the rest of the competing cards, we felt that its 256-bit memory bus width may possibly limit its gaming performance. With such a bus width, its memory bandwidth is 224.4GB/s, which is the lowest of the lot. This is despite having 4GB of GDDR5 video memory that has been rated to operate at 7010MHz.

From the first test, it appears the GeForce GTX 980 card is off to a shaky start; let us delve into more real-world gaming benchmarks to see where it stands!

Crysis 3 Results

For this benchmark test setup, we used the Fraps utility to measure the average frame rates churned out by each card at a stipulated rendered cutscene from Crysis 3. The game itself is driven by the CryEngine 3, with extreme amounts of tessellation, per-pixel per-object motion blur, Bokeh Depth of Field, displacement mapping on small terrain, particle and volumetric lighting and fog shadows, improved dynamic cloth and vegetation, dynamic caustics and diffuse shadows.

Even the stock GeForce GTX 780 Ti overtook the GTX 980; at the highest test settings, the latter was the only card to turn in a sub-20fps frame rate. Based on past experience, Crysis 3 has been the stronghold for NVIDIA GeForce GTX graphics cards. For this round, the GTX 980 card had the unenviable honor of losing ground to the rival, top-end ASUS Radeon R9 290X.

Thief Results

According to Eidos Montreal, Thief was built on a modified version of Unreal Engine 3. Since the release of AMD Catalyst 14.2 Beta drivers, owners of supported AMD desktop GPUs from the current Radeon R9 and R7 series, to the previous generation Radeon HD 5000 range, will be able to enjoy special graphical effects for this particular title.

Again, the performance of the GTX 980 card was most lackluster at the highest game settings where its recorded frame rate, of 34fps, dipped dangerously close to the 30fps level. Any score lower than this level would have noticeable video stutter.

Call of Duty: Ghosts Results

Our latest gaming benchmark features the IW6 engine, which has been updated from the one that powered the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. The newer game title supports NVIDIA's exclusive technologies like TXAA anti-aliasing, 3D Vision, SLI and PhysX. Despite its spanking new hardware improvements of its Maxwell architecture, the GTX 980 graphics card continued to languish.

Hitman: Absolution Results

The Hitman: Absolution game title features IO Interactive's proprietary Glacier2 engine; this hardware-intensive engine is able to render up to 1200 NPCs simultaneously. Besides the massive crowd of NPCs, it also features Reflective Shadow Mapping (RSM), Direct Compute accelerated Bokeh Depth of Field, extreme tessellation and Ambient Occlusion.

Besides having a comparatively narrower memory bus width of 256-bit, the GTX 980's GM204 GPU also has a CUDA core count of 2048, which is even lower than the GTX 780's count of 2304 CUDA cores. As a result, the gaming performance of GTX 980 has suffered throughout our testing. Perhaps the touted power efficiency of the new Maxwell GPUs have been pursued too far by NVIDIA, let us proceed to the next section to find out!