Results: Tomb Raider And Battlefield 4
Tomb Raider
This AMD title should be a home run for the red team. What we've seen previously happens over again at Full HD, and by the time we hit Ultra HD, AMD does end up in the lead. Nvidia's GeForce GTX 970 Mini (OC) performs particularly badly in Tomb Raider. The resulting frame rates just aren’t playable.
The frame render times promise an interesting analysis, since we can already see that the Nvidia graphics cards demonstrate very different results at higher resolutions.
This phenomenon affects the normalized graph as well, clearly showing that the curve is anything but smooth at Ultra HD.
If you thought that was bad, take a look at the frame-to-frame variance analysis at 4K. It's a horror story across the board for Nvidia. The GeForce GTX 970 Mini (OC)’s performance in particular is a nightmare.
Tomb Raider might not be the most taxing title out there, and it might even look dated by today’s standards. But it’s the first game that really shows the GeForce GTX 970 Mini (OC)’s memory limit, which really impacts performance in a negative way at 4K.
Battlefield 4 (Single Player)
Unfortunately, in order to produce reliable results, we have to forgo multi-player mode and use the single-player campaign instead. We’re running fresh benchmark numbers with the most up-to-date drivers, since many people still like to play Battlefield 4. Consequently, there is still optimization work being done by the graphics card manufacturers. Mantle didn’t really add anything to the Radeon R9 Nano’s performance, so we decided to skip it for all AMD graphics cards.
There’s not much of a difference between the Radeon R9 Nano and GeForce GTX 970 Mini (OC) at 1920x1080. The latter completely collapses at 3840x2160, though. The factory-overclocked Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 yields to the Nano as well.
The frame times are fairly well-balanced for all the tested graphics cards at the lowest resolution.
The normalized view looks a lot better with increasing resolution than it did in Tomb Raider.
Looking at the smoothness analysis, we see the same picture emerge. There is barely any visible stuttering.
BF4 stands the test of time, giving us the opportunity to watch graphics drivers evolve.
