The Division And The Witcher 3 Results
The Division
AMD and Nvidia are evenly matched in The Division. The GeForce GTX Titan X matches AMD’s Radeon R9 Fury X exactly, both edging out the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, which in turn shows up just ahead of the Radeon R9 Fury. Consider all of those cards playable.
Then the GeForce GTX 1080 sweeps in, offering a 32% speed-up over the GTX 980 Ti. Better still, a look at our frame time charts reveals exceptional smoothness.
A taxing workload at 3840x2160 takes the whole field down to marginal frame rates, on average. The GeForce GTX 1080 maintains about 40 FPS, dipping as low as 24 at one point. The same trough appears for every card in the frame rate over time chart, suggesting that a GeForce GTX Titan X, 980 Ti or Radeon R9 Fury X could also be considered playable at 4K and maxed-out detail settings.
The Witcher 3
Having put many, many hours into The Witcher 3, we know that this game is subject to some odd performance behavior. We disable vsync, but leave the in-game limiter at 60 FPS to work around some of this. That’s why you see the fastest graphics cards hitting a ceiling at 2560x1440. For the most part, we’re rewarded with minimal frame time variance. The boards unable to sustain 60 FPS are the ones that incur spikes through our benchmark.
The 4K numbers are more interesting because no one GPU maintains a steady 60 FPS. Even the GeForce GTX 1080, which is 34% faster than a GeForce GTX 980 Ti, dips in just under 50 FPS. The Pascal-based 1080 demonstrates low frame times with almost imperceptible variance throughout the run. Nvidia’s GeForce GTX Titan X and 980 Ti cannot say the same, nor can the vanilla 980.
Aside from a couple of aberrations, AMD’s cards run smoothly. They trade blows with their Nvidia-based competition in average and minimum performance, but simply can’t keep up with GeForce GTX 1080.
