The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Review
by Ryan Smith on May 31, 2015 6:00 PM ESTCivilization: Beyond Earth
Shifting gears from action to strategy, we have Civilization: Beyond Earth, the latest in the Civilization series of strategy games. Civilization is not quite as GPU-demanding as some of our action games, but at Ultra quality it can still pose a challenge for even high-end video cards. Meanwhile as the first Mantle-enabled strategy title Civilization gives us an interesting look into low-level API performance on larger scale games, along with a look at developer Firaxis’s interesting use of split frame rendering with Mantle to reduce latency rather than improving framerates.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the GTX 980 Ti and GTX Titan perform within a few percent of each other. Under Civilization the gap between the two is a hair larger than in other games, at 3-4%, but this is also as large of a gap as you’ll see for average framerates. Even here the two are for all meaningful purposes tied.
Meanwhile on an absolute basis, the GM200 twin remain the only single-GPU cards to crack 60fps, with GTX 980 Ti delivering 70.5fps at the game’s most extreme setting. This is once again well ahead of the GTX 980 – beating it by 34% at 4K, though by less at lower resolutions where we start to get CPU-bottlenecked.
I also want to quickly touch upon how the GTX 980 Ti compares to the last-generation high-end GK110 Kepler cards, the GTX 780 and GTX 780 Ti. Against GTX 780 in particular, in this test we see the GTX 980 Ti deliver 70-80% better performance. With this being the 2 year anniversary of the GTX 780’s release, this is especially notable since it’s such a good example of how performance has improved specifically at this $649 price point in the last 2 years. GM200 in general is not this fast versus GK110 – there’s only so much to be done at 28nm – but against GTX 780 in particular NVIDIA’s latest card looks quite good. Even GTX 780 Ti is not entirely immune, with GTX 980 Ti beating it by around 45% at 4K.
When it comes to minimum framerates the same story continues; the two GM200 cards are very close to each other, staying within 5%. At worst, you can say that the 7-17% performance advantage over the GTX 980 isn’t very impressive, though this is admittedly a game that’s not too far off from being CPU-bottlenecked.
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Yojimbo - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
After some research, I posted a long and detailed reply to such a statement before, I believe it was in these forums. Basically, the offending NVIDIA rebrands fell into three categories: One category was that NVIDIA introduced a new architecture and DIDN'T change the name from the previous one, then later, 6 months if I remember, when issuing more cards on the new architecture, decided to change to a new brand (a higher numbered series). That happened once, that I found. The second category is where NVIDIA let a previously released GPU cascade down to a lower segment of a newly updated lineup. So the high end of one generation becomes the middle of the next generation, and in the process gets a new name to be uniform with the entire lineup. The third category is where NVIDIA is targeting low-end OEM segments where they are probably fulfilling specific requests from the OEMs. This is probably the GF108 which you say has "plagued the low end for too long now", as if you are the arbiter of OEM's product offerings and what sort of GPU their customers need or want. I'm sorry I don't want to go looking for specific citations of all the various rebrands, because I did it before in a previous message in another thread.The rumors of the upcoming retail 300 series rebrand (and the already released OEM 300 series rebrand) is a completely different beast. It is an across-the-board rebrand where the newly-named cards seem to take up the exact same segment as the "old" cards they replace. Of course in the competitive landscape, that place has naturally shifted downward over the last two years, as NVIDIA has introduced a new line up of cards. But all AMD seems to be doing is introducing 1 or 2 new cards in the ultra-enthusiast segment, still based on their ~2 year old architecture, and renaming the entire line up. If they had done that 6 months after the lineup was originally released, it would look like indecision. But being that it's being done almost 2 years since the original cards came out, it looks like a desperate attempt at staying relevant.
Oxford Guy - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Nice spin. The bottom line is that both companies are guilty of deceptive naming practices, and that includes OEM nonsense.Yojimbo - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
In for a penny, in for a pound, eh? I too could say "nice spin" in turn. But I prefer to weigh facts.Oxford Guy - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
"I too could say 'nice spin' in turn. But I prefer to weigh facts."Like the fact that both companies are guilty of deceptive naming practices or the fact that your post was a lot of spin?
FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - link
AMD is guilty of going on a massive PR offensive, bending the weak minds of it's fanboys and swearing they would never rebrand as it is an unethical business practice.Then they launched their now completely laughable Gamer's Manifesto, which is one big fat lie.
They broke ever rule they ever laid out for their corpo pig PR halo, and as we can see, their fanboys to this very day cannot face reality.
AMD is dirtier than black box radiation
chizow - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Nice spin, no one is saying either company has clean hands here, but the level to which AMD has rebranded GCN is certainly, unprecedented.Oxford Guy - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Hear that sound? It's Orwell applauding.Klimax - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
I see only rhetoric. But facts and counter points are missing. Fail...Yojimbo - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Because I already posted them in another thread and I believe they were in reply to the same guy.Yojimbo - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Orwell said that severity doesn't matter, everything is binary?