The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Review
by Ryan Smith on May 31, 2015 6:00 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 2015.
Once more we find the GTX 980 Ti and GTX Titan X virtually tied. Across all settings and resolutions the GTX 980 Ti stays within 97-98% of the Titan’s performance. Consequently GTX Titan X is ever so marginally better, but not enough to make any real difference.
This also means that GTX 980 Ti continues with its very strong lead over the GTX 980. Once more we’re looking at a 26-31% performance advantage for the latest member of the GTX 900 series, in-line with its price premium.
Meanwhile on an absolute basis, as one of our most punishing games this is also a good reminder of why even GM200 cards can’t quite pull off high quality 4K gaming with a single GPU today. Even without MSAA and one step below Crysis 3’s Very High quality settings, the GTX 980 Ti can only muster 40.9fps. If you want to get to 60fps you will need to drop to Low quality, or drop the resolution to 1440p. The latter will get you 83.2fps at the same quality settings, which again highlights GTX 980 Ti’s second strength as a good card for driving high refresh rate 1440p displays.
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kyuu - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Witcher 3 runs just fine on my single 290. Is it just the xfire profile? Do you have the new driver and latest patches? Also, have you turned down tesselation or turned off hairworks?PEJUman - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
4K... was hoping my U28D590D will have freesync, but alas... no such luck. I am very sensitive to stutter, it gives me motion sickness, to the point I have to stop playing :(limiting hairworks to 8x does help, but I really dislike the hair without it. I rather wait for 15.5.1 or 15.6. I have other games to keep me busy for a while.
I can get 45 avg if I drop to 21:9 ratio using 2840 x 1646, but even then I still get motion sickness from the occasional drops.
chizow - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Yes CrossFire support of TW3 is broken from Day1, its a well-known issue. AMD hastily released a driver last week with a CF profile, but its virtually unusable as it introduces a number of other issues with AA and flickering icons.PEJUman - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
15.5 no longer flickers with or without AA. still slow though.chizow - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Are you sure? Did they release a follow-up to the 15.5 Beta? Because the notes and independent user feedback stated there was still flickering:*The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - To enable the best performance and experience in Crossfire, users must disable Anti-Aliasing from the games video-post processing options. Some random flickering may occur when using Crossfire. If the issue is affecting the game experience, as a work around we suggest disabling Crossfire while we continue to work with CD Projekt Red to resolve this issue
Peichen - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
295X2 is indeed faster but it also uses twice as much power. You have to take the 1000W PSU into account as well as one or two additional 120mm fans that's needed to get the heat out the case. When you add up all the extra cost for PSU, fans, electricity, noise and stutter against an overclocked 980Ti (last few pages of review), the slight speed advantage aren't going to be worth it.Also, Maxwell 2 supports DirectX 12, I am not so sure about any of the current AMD/ATI cards since they were designed in 2013.
xthetenth - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
You don't have to buy a new PSU every time you buy a high TDP card, but otherwise a valid point. Going multi-GPU for the same performance requires a much bigger price difference to be worth it vs. a single card.Kutark - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Basically you're gonna spend an extra $5/mo on electricity with that card, or $60/yr vs a 980ti. thats actually pretty huge. Thats at 4hrs/day of gaming, at an average of 12c/kwh. If you game 6 or 7 hours a day, its even worse.These high power cards are a little ridiculous. 600w just for one video card?!!
Daroller - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
I had a GTX690, and I run SLI TITAN X. Dual GPU IS a hindrance. You'd have to be blind, stupid, or a rabid fanboy to claim otherwise. The 295x2 isn't exempt from that just because you dislike NV and harbor a not so secret love for AMD.Daroller - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
I had a GTX690, and I run SLI TITAN X. Dual GPU IS a hindrance. You'd have to be blind, stupid, or a rabid fanboy to claim otherwise. The 295x2 isn't exempt from that just because you dislike NV and harbor a not so secret love for AMD.