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

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.

The further we peer into these results, the clearer it becomes to me that we’re going to be due for another GPU suite overhaul soon. Most PC gamers out there run 1080p, but as we’ve seen up to this point, none of these cards struggle with 1440p, which has 77% more pixels. Clearly, we’d be seeing far greater deltas at 4K. I still believe the hype surrounding 4K is severely overblown, but it seems inevitable that I’ll be adding it to our suite at some point soon.

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.

SHOGUN 2 is the only game in our suite which shows that a single 980 isn’t even enough to deliver silky-smooth gameplay at 5760×1080. Granted, that’s with anti-aliasing and every other setting maxed, so it wouldn’t be hard to reach 60 FPS if it were that important (and I’d argue that it is).