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Results: Battlefield 4 And Thief

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

Battlefield 4

We'll begin our benchmarks with one of the most popular first person shooters available today, powered by the technologically advanced Frostbite 3 graphics engine: Battlefield 4.

Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 980 puts achieves an impressive showing, easily sailing past the GK110-powered GeForce GTX 780 Ti and earning the top spot. What's more, the GeForce GTX 970 bests the Radeon R9 290X in DirectX, and AMD's single-GPU top dog can only achieve parity when it leverages the company's Mantle API.

But 1080p is low-hanging fruit for Nvidia's new graphics cards, so let's up the ante to 4K. Unfortunately, we had to pull back the level of detail from Ultra to High in order to allow the GeForce GTX 980 to achieve our target 30 FPS minimum/40 FPS average frame rate. 

The GeForce GTX 980 still leads the pack, but by a smaller margin. The GeForce GTX 970 falls back a bit relative to the Radeons, but still manages a strong showing considering its relatively low MSRP.

Thief

Thief is another modern title that can be difficult for today's graphics hardware to handle. We'll begin at 1080p with the very high detail preset invoked.

The GeForce GTX 980 achieves the best showing as it did in Battlefield 4, and the GeForce GTX 970 is right behind the GeForce GTX 780 Ti. Even when outfitted with the Mantle code path, the Radeon R9 290X can't beat Nvidia's new £275 card. The GeForce GTX 970 is shaping up to be an impressive value proposition. But what about Ultra HD resolution?

Once again, we had to dial back the visual settings to keep things smooth, trading the very high detail preset for the normal detail preset. Still, it looks very impressive at 3840x2160. A note about frame time latency: Thief's graphics engine suffers from a little lag across all of the cards we tested for this benchmark, unfortunately, but the good news is that we haven't found it to be noticeable while actually playing the game.

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  • 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.
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