Results: Arma 3 And Grid Autosport
Arma 3
And now let's put everyone's favorite hyper-realistic combat simulator, Arma 3, to the test:
It looks like the GeForce GTX 980, 970, and 780 Ti are hitting a platform bottleneck at 1080p when the ultra detail setting is used in conjunction with 4x MSAA. Nvidia's newest products continue to shine in this benchmark and we have a pretty clear expectation of performance by now. Note how the Radeon R9 280X suffers from some significant frame time variance spikes, it's not bad enough to be a deal breaker but you can notice it while playing.
When we increase resolution to 3840x2160, the GeForce GTX 970 falls behind the pack slightly where raw frame rates are concerned, but it maintains a playable pace and a relatively flat frame time variance. The same can not be said for the Radeon cards, which suffer from some judder at this high resolution.
Grid Autosport
Grid Autosport is the newest installment in the popular racing series, and we've recently added it to our benchmarking suite. As usual, Codemasters did a wonderful job with their game engine, allowing us to push all of the details to their maximum settings, crank MSAA up to 8x, and maintain incredibly smooth performance.
Note how none of these cards spend a significant amount of time below 60 FPS. It should come as no surprise by now that the GeForce GTX 970 and 980 can easily handle 1920x1080 at ultra high detail settings in almost every game we throw at them. Let's see how these cards handle those same settings, including hardware intensive 8x MSAA, on a 4K monitor.
All of the cards tested managed to maintain the minimum frame rate above 30 FPS, and the majority kept the average frame rate above 40 FPS. Those that missed the mark did it by a small margin, meaning that this game is quite playable with 8x MSAA at 4K!
