Performance Results
As I mentioned, some of the games we have don’t offer every sampling feature and many of the older video cards don’t support or easily support them. The list above makes a bit more sense. When possible in testing, we enable the ones available as they’re part of the new GPU’s features. If your monitor doesn’t support 4K, then DSR can help spice up the graphics a bit. We opted not to push anything outside standard boundaries.
Synthetic Benchmarks
Starting things off with synthetic benchmarks, we put the cards up to tests with two of the more popular benchmarks that anyone can download and run on their own: 3DMark 11 and Unigen Heaven Demo.
3DMark 11
Standard Performance scores say a lot about the GPU regardless of any CUDA core counts and other resources that favor something like a Titan. This is a good indicator of how the efficiency favors Maxwell.
Unigine Heaven
 
After running the benchmark many times, the GTX 980 managed 108 FPS in the demo. That’s very impressive against the GTX 780’s lower 88 FPS. The GTX 780 Ti closes the gap a bit more at 97 FPS.
Gaming Benchmarks
With the synthetic benches out of the way, let’s get to the more fun stuff, and exactly what NVIDIA makes their GeForce cards for: Gaming!
Crysis 3
It’s been a smooth adventure cranking everything up on this older, but still ferociously punishing title (with an uncertain future). The minimum frame count I noticed was about 53 frames. There’s a great deal of wave, chopper, and gun play action going on in the recorded benchmark so your results may be higher, depending on how smooth your route through the game is. But we chose to take a harder route, and you can clearly see, the GTX 980 stepping up with a very playable frame rate.
Metro: Last Light
Maxwell handles this graphically intensive title brilliantly. It’s a great experience when you can see all that the game has to offer, while being able to successfully play it very smoothly.
Battlefield 4
This was a pleasant surprise. Maxwell scoffs at Battlefield 4 even with insanely detailed settings. Suck it Battlefield 4!
We’ve just got a couple more benchmarks so, so let’s have a look at those and take it on home with some overclocking remarks and our thoughts on NVIDIA’s latest GPU!