The New King Of High-end: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Review

Tom Clancy is responsible for a countless number of video games, but his Splinter Cell series has become something special, with each game released having been considered “great” overall. The latest in the series, Blacklist, is no exception, and thankfully for us, its graphics are fantastic, and not to mention intensive. For those who love a stealth element in their games, this is one that shouldn’t be skipped.

RIP, Tom Clancy.

Manual Run-through: From the start of the ‘Safehouse’ level in Benghazi, Libya, we progress through until we reach an apartment building that must be entered – this is where we end the FPS recording.

As we’ve seen time and time again in this review so far, 4K really separates the men from the boys. While a game may run swimmingly at 1440p, 4K is punishing, dropping even the TITAN X’s framerate from 108 to 57. Even with the 980 Ti’s 52 FPS, the game ran very well, but if you’d rather hit 60 FPS, cutting back on ambient occlusion will be your best fix.

Total War: SHOGUN 2

Strategy games are well-known for pushing the limits of any system, and few others do this as well as Total War: SHOGUN 2. It fully supports DX11, has huge battlefields to oversee with hundreds or thousands of units, and a ton of graphics options to adjust. It’s quite simply a beast of a game.

Manual Run-through: SHOGUN 2 is one of the few games in our suite where the built-in benchmark is opted for. Strategy games in particular are very difficult to benchmark, so this is where I become thankful to have the option of using a built-in benchmark.

Wrapping up our gaming benches is SHOGUN 2 to reconfirm what we’ve seen up to this point: TITAN X is not much faster than the 980 Ti, but the 980 Ti is a lot faster than the 980.