Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
Despite its status as an Nvidia Gameworks partner title, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is known to perform well with the Hawaii GPU in the Radeon R9 290 series. Let's see how the new GeForce cards compare:
At 1080p the high-end graphics cards run in to a clear platform bottleneck, so it's difficult to call out any real winners amongst these super elite products. Perhaps bumping up the resolution will separate the men from the boys:
It remains a tight race but the GeForce GTX 980 has demonstrated a clear trend of achieving best-in-class performance at 4K, and manages over 40 FPS average in this case with very high details enabled.
Watchdogs
Watchdogs can be brutal on medium-range hardware, but it does not present an insurmountable burden for the top-tier graphics hardware we're throwing at it today.
Even with the high detail preset enabled, all of these graphics cards handle 1080p without too much problem, but you can see that this game engine is plagued with significant frame time variance spikes. This is most likely caused by loading chunks of the large game world as we travel through it in a speeding vehicle.
Increase the resolution to 3640x2160, though, and we need to settle for the medium detail preset. Even so, the frame time variance spikes increase and impact the player's experience. The issue isn't distracting enough to make the game unplayable, though.
Far Cry 3
The final game in today's benchmark tests, Far Cry 3 remains a sterling example of a beautiful graphics engine with lush foliage that is affected by your avatar as you walk through the jungle.
The new GeForce cards stand tall here, as they have throughout the rest of our benchmark suite. You can see that Radeon graphics cards demonstrate considerably more frame time variance than their competitors, which can manifest as micro stutter and be an annoyance in this game.
With the resolution increased to 4K, details must be dropped to the medium preset in order to maintain playability with even the fastest single-GPU cards. The GeForce GTX 970 and 980 distinguish themselves yet again, although the Radeon frame time variance issue we saw at 1080p has curiously become less of a problem.
- Introducing GM204: There's A New Maxwell In Town
- New Features
- Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Reference Card
- Gigabyte GTX 980 WindForce OC
- Gigabyte GTX 970 WindForce OC
- EVGA GTX 970 Superclock ACX 2.0
- Test System And Benchmarks
- Results: Battlefield 4 And Thief
- Results: Arma 3 And Grid Autosport
- Results: Assassin's Creed IV, Watchdogs, Far Cry 3
- A New Power Consumption Test Setup
- Power Consumption In Detail
- Power Consumption Overview
- Efficiency
- Temperatures And Noise
- Verdict
Good stuff here - but you guys were a bit slow on this one. Tom's Hardware is the first site I visit every morning. But with the delay of this article, I've been all over the net this morning on other sites that got their stuff out sooner.
I was hoping for more performance but the efficiency is quite nice. They just put pressure on the top end and gave us a price reduction, instead of overall performance gains.
Likely, we're going to see a Maxwell Titan equivalent come in the next year or so as these are a x04 much like Kepler with the 670/80s were and we're still going to be waiting to see what the x10 will be with the Maxwell architecture.
Good stuff here - but you guys were a bit slow on this one. Tom's Hardware is the first site I visit every morning. But with the delay of this article, I've been all over the net this morning on other sites that got their stuff out sooner.
That's some flat out insane price / performance ratio right there!
Same answer to both... no time.
We literally got the 970 for testing yesterday. The 980, we got the day before. We barely got the article out by this morning.
For those of you who want more info, we'll be spending more time with the GeForce GTX 980 and 970 in the weeks to come, don't you worry.
I'm waiting for the real Maximum Maxwell myself. Unimpressed with these xxx04 launches from Nvidia.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_970_SLI/
Depending on resolution, dual 970's are roughly equal to the 295x2 at only 2/3's the price.
The features that Nvidia has been rolling out constantly has been quite impressive, while many of them do not appeal to me at all, the sheer amount and in most cases quality of them is insane.
Well done Nvidia. Let's see what AMD responds with, my next main gaming machine purchase as of now are 2 x Nvidia GTX970.
EDIT : Im sure that its a good upgrade to my 2 x HD7950s
Same answer to both... no time.
We literally got the 970 for testing yesterday. The 980, we got the day before. We barely got the article out by this morning.
For those of you who want more info, we'll be spending more time with the GeForce GTX 980 and 970 in the weeks to come, don't you worry.
Thank you! That answered a question I had in a previous GTX980/970 tease on the live news feed.
Do you guys have this problem often with Nvidia? You always seem to have fewer Nvidia board partner variaty and slower review releases on Nvidia GPUs.
More so than other websites.
Same answer to both... no time.
We literally got the 970 for testing yesterday. The 980, we got the day before. We barely got the article out by this morning.
For those of you who want more info, we'll be spending more time with the GeForce GTX 980 and 970 in the weeks to come, don't you worry.
Thank you! That answered a question I had in a previous GTX980/970 tease on the live news feed.
Do you guys have this problem often with Nvidia? You always seem to have fewer Nvidia board partner variaty and slower review releases on Nvidia GPUs.
More so than other websites.
My bets are that no NVidia GPUs on the best GPU's for the $$ for the past several months earned Tom's a slight delay in the delivery of these GPUs.
My bets are that no NVidia GPUs on the best GPU's for the $$ for the past several months earned Tom's a slight delay in the delivery of these GPUs.
Nah, doubt Nvidia is that petty.
More publicity is exactly that, more publicity.
Tom's has been around a long time and is trusted by A LOT of people.
Doubt Nvidia would compromise the user base.