Gaming Benchmarks Continued
Splinter Cell
Again, it’s smooth intense action here under my crazy outdoor, search light, gun play chaotic benchmark. This is a pretty game to experience, and even better when maxed out. Especially with playable frame rates.
Far Cry 3
Despite the very detailed Far Cry 3 title, the graphics are smooth and quite nice on the eyes. It’s even better when you can see far off details more clearly. Either way, it’s no problem for the GTX 980.
Temperature, Power Consumption, and Overclocking
Although reference cards do overclock, we try not to push them too far. The reason is due to the smaller GPU coolers commonly found on them. If you want your GPU to last, NVIDIA partners tend to use cooling solutions intended to add cooling and overclocking performance. We’ve been especially impressed by some of the solutions from ZOTAC at launch, as they make a more serious effort to capture market share. We expect to see even more insane solutions down the road.
At any rate, we recorded temps and overclocked the card using auto fan control inside a Thermaltake T81 Urban enclosure. MSI Afterburner, ASUS GPU Tweak, and EVGA Precision are three possible software utilities you can use to overclock your NVIDIA based video card. Despite UI differences, they do roughly the same thing.
At stock, the GTX 980 idled at 14C when the display and system go dormant and reached 42C at desktop with no audible fan noise. Under intense 3D benchmarks, the GPU heated up to 63C with a mere 19 dB fan noise.
When overclocked using Precision X (v16) to 1367 MHz adding about 43 millivolts with a limited 80C max operating temp, but the card doesn’t seem to be anymore audible inside our test rig. The memory topped out at 7.8 GHz which is at least something. We suspect we’re on the edge of oblivion with GDDR5. The performance gains on Metro Last Light and Crysis were about 8 frames in reality so pushing hard seems to only give benchmark bragging rights.
What about power consumption? The test system didn’t top 450 watts during gaming. In fact, the card didn’t seem to want more than 160 Watts playing the more intensive DX11 titles.
Final Thoughts
NVIDIA has this habit of surprising and delighting its community of users. And when they know they have a winner, they tend to make a deal out of it. And their GAME24 event, clearly showed, they had something special in store for their community of fans and gamers. With the launch of the GTX 980 and GTX 970, AMD is definitely on notice in a big way, both in terms of performance and price.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 fulfills the need for higher frame rates, surprisingly lower power consumption, and an overall higher graphics quality thanks to next generation technologies. It’s also very low noise thanks to a more efficient GPU, which has already seen some impressive third party cooling solutions. But more than anything, $599 US buys you a lot of GPU. And from what we’ve seen thus far, the $399 GTX 970 isn’t far behind it at all, and we’ll be looking at that closely as cards with non-reference coolers hit the shelves.
When we consider Maxwell’s extra graphics features like VXGI lighting, Multi-Frame Sampling, Dynamic Super Resolution, and performance, we see there has been real innovation at NVIDIA improving what we consumers spend our hard earned money on – an amazing user experience. It’s safe to say that there is a lot of head room in Maxwell and we look forward to seeing titles that take full advantage of it. And we can’t wait to see how much further we can push partner solutions and their beefed up coolers.
We congratulate NVIDIA on their newest GPU architecture, and how far they’ve taken it from GTX 750 Ti. With so much going for it, and so much excitement by the community, and even jaded reviewers, we’re happy to throw our Editor’s Choice on it. If you have $599 US (probably a bit less) to spend on the best gaming experience out there, the GTX 980 is it!
Pros
- Impressive performance and features
- Energy efficient and cool running
- Still much to explore with the Maxwell architecture
- VXGI, Multi-Frame Sampling, DSR, and TXAA graphic goodness
- Priced lower than the original GTX 780 at launch (but much faster!)
Cons
- We only got one to test!
Overall Rating: 9.5 / 10.0
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