Sign in with
Sign up | Sign in

Results: Assassin's Creed IV, Watchdogs, Far Cry 3

Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 And 980 Review: Maximum Maxwell
By , Igor Wallossek

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag

Despite it's status as an Nvidia Gameworks partner title, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is known to perform well with the Hawaii GPU in the Radeon R9 290 series. Let's see how the new GeForce cards compare:

At 1080p the high-end graphics cards run in to a clear platform bottleneck, so it's difficult to call out any real winners amongst these super elite products. Perhaps bumping up the resolution will separate the men from the boys:

It remains a tight race but the GeForce GTX 980 has demonstrated a clear trend of achieving best-in-class performance at 4K, and manages over 40 FPS average in this case with very high details enabled.

Watchdogs

Watchdogs can be brutal on medium-range hardware, but it does not present an insurmountable burden for the top-tier graphics hardware we're throwing at it today.

Even with the high detail preset enabled, all of these graphics cards handle 1080p without too much problem, but you can see that this game engine is plagued with significant frame time variance spikes. This is most likely caused by loading chunks of the large game world as we travel through it in a speeding vehicle.

Increase the resolution to 3640x2160, though, and we need to settle for the medium detail preset. Even so, the frame time variance spikes increase and impact the player's experience. The issue isn't distracting enough to make the game unplayable, though.

Far Cry 3

The final game in today's benchmark tests, Far Cry 3 remains a sterling example of a beautiful graphics engine with lush foliage that is affected by your avatar as you walk through the jungle.

The new GeForce cards stand tall here, as they have throughout the rest of our benchmark suite. You can see that Radeon graphics cards demonstrate considerably more frame time variance than their competitors, which can manifest as micro stutter and be an annoyance in this game.


With the resolution increased to 4K, details must be dropped to the medium preset in order to maintain playability with even the fastest single-GPU cards. The GeForce GTX 970 and 980 distinguish themselves yet again, although the Radeon frame time variance issue we saw at 1080p has curiously become less of a problem.

Add a comment
Ask a Category Expert
React To This Article

Create a new thread in the UK Article comments forum about this subject

Example: Notebook, Android, SSD hard drive

Display all 11 comments.
  • 0 Hide
    Ce3in , 19 September 2014 13:24
    Excellent Review!

    Looks like The Gtx 980 will become a part of my build family!
  • 0 Hide
    HEXiT , 19 September 2014 20:31
    went to buy 1 form ocuk today as they had around 70 in stock of both the 970 and 980... but by the time i sorted the order (about 10 mis) they were out of stock...
    so roll on next week and hopefully they will have them back in stock...
  • 1 Hide
    Marco Washa , 20 September 2014 06:09
    These cards are really impressive. GG nVidia you have done right this time.
    -Top performance as always
    -Low power consumption
    -A right price this time XD
  • 2 Hide
    Marco Washa , 20 September 2014 06:12
    These cards are really impressive. GG nVidia you have done right this time.
    -Top performance as always
    -Low power consumption
    -A right price this time XD
  • 0 Hide
    shaunwil , 20 September 2014 09:47
    Bought a 980 from scan. By 2pm they had sold almost 300 cards in the day. Looking forward to 4k G-sync with the card now when the monitor comes available.
  • 0 Hide
    Omar101 , 21 September 2014 22:51

    nvidia
  • 0 Hide
    Alpha3031 , 22 September 2014 05:00
    Now, if AMD actually made some progress with power. That should drive prices down too.
  • 0 Hide
    Mahisse , 22 September 2014 11:42
    I fear this may be the beginning of the end for AMD GPU. Seems like Nvidia is beating AMD on any entry level now with a better cost/performance ratio. I want competition not monopoly!
  • 0 Hide
    Alpha3031 , 23 September 2014 03:15
    Triple post?
  • 0 Hide
    Mahisse , 23 September 2014 09:30
    Don't know how that happened but they are deleted now :) 
  • 0 Hide
    Bitty , 9 October 2014 14:51
    Just getting back into gaming after a huge gap. Got a Gigabyte G1 gtx970 (another later) to replace a very well-behaved AMD 9790 GHz. All seemed ok until I hit replay in Grid2 when it froze. Repeatedly it did this with oc or not but temps etc were fine. hmmmmm. Valley worked like a charm with none and big overclocks - no artifacts. Titanfall would freeze too. Asetto Corsa was fine. I looked about and saw a few complaining of similar issues thinking the 344.16 drivers were the cause. I suspec ted that power might be an issue since other factors were okay and not everybody has the issue. I then found this article on power draw and the penny dropped.

    I have an oldish Antec TP New Series 650 watt modular psu. I had the gtx970 on one 25A 12v rail feeding the 8+6 connectors. It seems this was possibly not enough to cope with the peaks. Not up on psus but with 80% efficiency that 25x12 is not a full 300 watts - more like 240watts. So, I added another 12v rail for the 6pin and hey presto it worked fine no issue.

    So anyone with such an issue might try this or get a more powerful psu.
React To This Article