Metro: Last Light, Middle-Earth And The Witcher 3
Metro: Last Light
Our fourth benchmark, Metro essentially confirms what we’ve seen three times already: GeForce GTX 980 Ti hugs the Titan X at both 2560x1440 and 3840x2160.
Radeon R9 295X2 delivers notably more performance at both resolutions. What you pay in exchange is much higher power consumption/heat and greater frame time variance, even with frame pacing enabled.
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Interestingly enough, although AMD’s Radeon R9 295X2 achieves much higher average frame rates at both resolutions, its sporadic behavior results in lower minimums. Our frame rate over time charts illustrate the card’s issues pretty clearly.
Although the GeForce GTX 980 Ti trails Titan X by the largest separation we’ve seen yet, it still averages more than 44 FPS in Middle-earth at 3840x2160.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
The Witcher 3 is a hot topic right now, both for its great visuals and controversial implementation of Nvidia’s HairWorks technology (incidentally, we leave that feature disabled for our tests).
As expected, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti and Titan X appear close together in our charts. Game play at 2560x1440 feels smooth; at 3840x2160 it’s not as responsive, in spite of frame rates that remain above 30. You might want to consider a less-demanding preset to improve performance.
Missing from its top position is AMD’s Radeon R9 295X2. The company did introduce Catalyst 15.5 Beta to address some of its issues in The Witcher 3. However, the driver doesn't help performance with a single Radeon R9 290X. It does benefit the R9 295X2 somewhat. But the scores we recorded were still below its single-GPU card. As such, we'll leave our benchmark numbers under Catalyst 15.4 in the charts as we wait for a technical explanation from AMD.
Not that a Radeon R9 290X is all that bad. The card offers a good experience at 2560x1440, besting the GeForce GTX 780 Ti and original Titan.