NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review: Does Maxwell Bring Maximum Gameplay?

I don’t believe in overkill just for the sake of overkill. If someone purchases a second GPU, it should give them some obvious gain, not just some e-peen satisfaction. With 4K, you’re already cramming an absurd number of pixels into a ~27-inch display – so why on earth would FXAA not suffice? That’s an effective AA mode at lower resolutions; it’d be extremely suitable for 4K.

I’d take 1440p displays in Surround with very high detail levels over a 4K display with absurd AA levels any day. At least then I’d be improving immersion and my experience overall.

Alright – I ran the game maxed-out (4x TXAA) @ 4K and 3.4GB of VRAM was used (over a painful 10 minute run @ about 13 FPS average on a GTX 970 – ow). So, I concede that if you want to use the highest AA available at 4K, more than 4GB would be welcomed. But, it must be said that given I hit 20 FPS with FXAA @ Very High 4K with a 980, at least 3x 980 would be needed for 60 FPS – and that’s still not taking into account the TXAA-esque AA you’re after.

“It’s playing dirty.”

I can understand why you’d think that, but TITAN Black is still considered a current card. NVIDIA wasn’t about to bastardize sales of that, as unfortunate as it is. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a TITAN replacement in six months or so that gives us 8GB of VRAM and 2880 cores or so. Then maybe NVIDIA will give you the 6GB on the regular 980 you want so much.

NVIDIA released the 780 as a 3GB card. There’s no downgrading going on at all.

You’re confusing NVIDIA with its partners. Companies like EVGA released 6GB 780s nearly a year after the launch of the 3GB model. NVIDIA prevented the same companies from releasing a 6GB 780 Ti because it’d essentially match the TITAN Black – not counting that card’s enhanced double-precision performance.

You’re comparing what NVIDIA’s done to what third-party partners did – that’s nonsense.

As I said, those third-parties released 6GB cards long after the initial launch of the 780. It’s no surprise that the 980/970 didn’t launch with 6GB models since the demand is almost non-existent.

Oh – I agree. But it’s not as though 6GB cards are not coming; they just were not available for launch. In a perfect world, the higher-density cards would have shown up at launch, but the demand is so low that it makes business sense to focus on the core models first.

I remember a rumor that said this generation should have 8GB cards as well. I wish that meant that PC games would actually start being able to take advantage of the higher VRAM. Anti-aliasing shouldn’t be the only reason higher VRAM is needed.

At 4K? I never heard of this game until yesterday, so I’ll install it and see what I can push.

Oh, but he goes into that technical data? I’m not huge into watching videos, and much less didn’t want to spend 50 minutes looking through that one. Installing and will test later when I get a chance.

Cheers, I would have overlooked that. Had to clear off some stuff on that drive before I could even install it. 35GB base install… damn.

I don’t have a second GTX 980 (yet), so testing will just be done with one. And I read somewhere that the game has a built-in benchmark, so I’ll just use that (I don’t have interest in the game, though it does look like it will be in our next GPU suite update, given the obvious). Also for VRAM usage I’ll use AIDA64, since it spits out the results in a nice format.

This CPU has served me well. I just inherit whatever I have in the GPU test rig after I retire a platform. I was going to upgrade the 4960X to the 5960X in that machine, but when it comes to game benchmarking, I’d rather stick to the 4.5GHz overclock on the 4960X to feel safer about the results.

Of course… that’s until games come out that saturate eight cores.

As for the game, what I find odd is that it’s NVIDIA-sponsored, but there’s no mention of it on GeForce.com. There’s a special AO setting, but that’s about it. I figured there’d be at least TXAA in here or something, but no.

I’ll soon be getting a Quadro K5200 in, and while it’s not a gaming card, it -does- have an 8GB framebuffer. Once it gets here I’ll revisit this game to see if it manages to saturate that as well.

$1,000 CPUs were a little easier to justify years ago, but nowadays, most people can get by with midrange parts just fine, and then overclock them if need be. The 5960X is the first $1K chip in a while to potentially be worth it, because you just can’t get that kind of throughput anywhere else. Before that, the 980X I suppose was worth it also, since it was the first six-core. The ones in between that were so minor in advancement that they just were not exciting.

So, I’m with you – save $500 on the CPU and add another GPU. The CPU is not the bottleneck right now while the GPU is, so it makes all the sense in the world to maximize your graphics output.

TG’s FB link is on the right side of the site; if you mean my own, I can be found in the comments on that page, you can just click me.

You didn’t realize the person talking to you had the same name as the author of the review? ;-)

Yes, 980X was X58. I can barely even remember it now, because tech moves so fast. I remember being stoked at the fact that it was a six-core CPU though. I punned it and said it delivered “Sick Scores”.

30 FPS on a 4K is harsh, as is the wait for larger 970/980s. I’d ask NVIDIA for a timeline, but I know I won’t get one (it doesn’t want to bastardize current models). Your best solution, even though it’s not ideal, is to offload your cards when the 6~8GB models finally do get pushed out the door. Chances are they will still be worth a pretty penny.

It’s all good, I’m just razzing ;-)

“I just lost a lot of money by buying 3 290x cards that perform very poorly and had the resale value of an american car.”

For what it’s worth, the last bit made me laugh. Also, over 20x 290? That is unbelievable. You might want to hit up Reddit’s /r/hardwareswap section to see if you can offload a bunch of them. Sadly, it’s harder than ever to sell those given this new NVIDIA series, but I obviously don’t need to tell you that…

I talked to NVIDIA about this, and was told that Mordor is reporting its VRAM usage incorrectly. Something I didn’t realize is that tools like GPU-Z and AIDA64 do not actually tap into the GPU itself to get these readings; they instead base the VRAM usage on what the apps are telling them. NVIDIA compared it to a real-life reporter who can report on something incorrectly because their source is likewise incorrect.

I guess it does make sense, because even though the game supposedly hogs the entire 4GB (or close to it) on this 980, the game never stutters. If the memory was truly being fully saturated, that wouldn’t be the case. I had just figured that the game used some sort of special caching, but NVIDIA’s final answer is that the game is simply reporting the VRAM usage incorrectly.

I am wondering if there’d be a difference in visual detail at all if the game is run on a 4GB card or an 8GB one. This is the kind of thing that would be extremely difficult to get a good answer from the devs for. I had a hard enough time coming to a conclusion with NVIDIA.

Let’s all sit here and criticize how the game looks by all that have never seen it at 4k, with AA and with ultra textures. That makes sense. @RobWilliamsTG:disqus 8GB useless for “mobile gpu”. There is a wave of portable desktops (they look like laptops) and have minuscule performance differences vs desktops (mostly because desktop users tend to only have 1 GPU). In six months or less nvidia will go back to 6GB on the same cards selling now. The 880 was supposed to have 8GB on the desktop as well but we got the finger instead.

“We’ve already established that 4GB isn’t a limiting factor in Mordor at 4K.” Assumption: You never played the game. You think the benchmark looks playable so the game is playable. It is not.
“I still haven’t had undeniable proof that 4GB isn’t enough.” (You are in denial) Please turn AA on and say goodbye to your vram. I don’t lower my settings and pretend the game looks the same.
“but will that even surpass a legitimate 4GB?” This one comes up over and over (from you). Mordor can do at least 8GB, I know some guy at nvidia told you it reported wrong but not by how much. Crysis 3 also does over 4GB of vram at 4k with all settings up. Same with Metro Last Light.
Benchmarks are great but the real test is the game. A benchmark won’t tell you when the textures don’t load because you have as much vram on a gpu as 3 years ago.
“On the mobile front… 8GB is just nonsense.” There are people with 4k laptops and some that play surround. A $2000-$3000 laptop is no joke.
… and last “4K isn’t that big of a deal…” I have done nothing in gaming but pursue resolution for over 10 years. Packing more pixels in less space is an incredible achievement and quite noticeable. I have been playing with 3 monitors since the GTX 295 and dropped almost a year ago when I could replace it with a single 4k panel. I can’t see myself “arguing” about video gaming with someone that doesn’t see the benefits of 4 times 1080p. That one just leaves me speechless.

AA is Anti-Aliasing. If you turn it off you can play anything with a 3GB vram card. I think 3 GTX 980’s are not enough to max out this game, I won’t find out until they become available for purchase. I hope it takes months, in that way I will be able to buy the 6-8gb card.

It was with the benchmark. I haven’t had the time or interest to get into the game itself, though I will if it ends up being a game worth adding to our next GPU test suite.

And yes, if it shows 10GB+ for 1080p, something is definitely up with how the app reports the VRAM. I am sure this isn’t totally uncommon; I normally don’t pay attention to VRAM at all.

8GB of VRAM on a mobile chip is about as pointless as it gets.

The demand is as big as the demand for 980’s. We are not paying 1000 plus just so we can play at stock settings.