Little bit disappointed with the 980 Ti performance

[bystander36]

That last quote is looking at everything backwards. It isn't Nvidia that decides how well a GPU handles a game. It is the dev's who decide what settings they offer you based on what the GPU's of the time can handle at the typical resolutions used.

If AMD and Nvidia offered GPU's that were 400% more powerful than now, dev's would simply give you quality settings that would push them at 1080p, and you still couldn't max out many AAA games at 4K.

 

[soccerballtux]

I am hoping DX12 and UE4 games will start to change things or upgrading graphics cards looks like it has now become a game of chasing e-peen pixels and overcoming the horrendously unoptimized AAA PC game coding & GW titles that sometimes look inferior to the console versions! :whiste:

I mean look at Fallout 4 -- those graphics are so mediocre for a 2015 PC game but yet NV/AMD expect us to buy $650 GPUs?



But 980Ti OC is basically as fast as GTX970 SLI or R9 295X2. What PC game since Crysis 3 or RYSE Son of Rome has wowed you graphically? The Order 1886 and Uncharted 4 are literally pissing all over every single 2014-2015 PC game out despite using mediocre hardware. On the PC I am moving draw distance slider in Dying Light which hammers performance and I need a magnifying glass in a still screenshot to see the difference. x64 tessellation factor + 8xMSAA that hammered GPUs with HairWorks in The Witcher 3 before Patch 1.07, while the foliage, trees and grass look like a game made 5 years ago, in many ways inferior to Crysis 1 as far as physics effects go. FAIL.



That has probably a lot to do with Uber Sampling.



It's probably going to be better to sell the 980Ti and upgrade to Big Pascal instead. 16nm + next gen architecture + HBM2 should be a huge upgrade.

100% agree with you on 4k, and approve of your 1440p decision. I sadly wish you had gone with a 32" 1440p monitor like my QNIX shown in my sig as I think that's a much better upgrade than simply the 1440p is by itself. I always said I wouldn't be getting 1440p unless it was larger than 27", and I'm glad I got this 32" one over a 27"-er.

I think I will probably upgrade GPU when UE4/UT4 comes out. I'll get something top of the line able to handle UT4 at 90FPS, and then I'll be good for a few years. Otherwise, I'm not very impressed that we still haven't beaten Crysis level graphics.

 

[soccerballtux]

2560 * 1440 = 1920 * 1080 * 1.78
GTX 980 Ti = GTX 970 * 1.41 (techpowerup)

1.41/1.78 = 0.79

GTX 980 Ti should be getting ~20% lower frames on 1440p than GTX 970 does on 1080p. However, judging by techpowerup's benches, it doesn't seem to be so drastic, more like 10% lower. So GTX 980 Ti actually handles 1440p a bit better than you'd expect based on the difference in pixel count - but not as smoothly as GTX 970 on 1080p.

fairly weak handwaving here. Pushing more pixels might only be a minor drag on the GPU-- bigger drag could be the vertexes, or the game world, or the shading...

You all hit the nail on the head. The moment I turned on Uber Sampling (still don't know what it does) on TW2, it started to lag a bit but the picture did look a bit more crisp than without it. For Last Light, again SSAA (again, what the hell does this actually do) kills the FPS and not just in-game. The moment I enable it even on low, the main menu goes down to 20FPS.

Whatever happened to the old simple days of AA, AF, Bloom, HDR, View Distance, Texture Size, etc.? It seems most games today have more acronyms than keybindings and every single game just expects we know exactly what that particular setting will do to the game. I could always look it up and in some cases I have, but I still see absolutely zero difference in the comparison screenshots provided via Google (Alpha to Coverage is a perfect example - in Grim Dawn I see no difference but also no hit to performance and the comparison screenshots used by Google are mostly from DayZ and I honestly see no difference).

Thanks for all the replies. Perhaps I should start trying to push this card to 1400 as many people have suggested.

yes, you should definitely be overclocking. IMO the only reason to buy that top of the line part is if you're going to overclock it. Otherwise, forget it, get the 290x for less than half the price, and upgrade in 2 years.

Went from 2 water cooled (EK block) Sapphire Tri-X OC R9-290s in CF (1000 core/1300 memory) to a single water cooled (EK block) EVGA GTX980TI SC (1102 core/1753 memory).

In synthetic benchmarks (i.e. Firestrike 3d) the dual 290s report higher scores. The OC room on my 290s left me to have a stable OC of 1100/1400. Oh I know some OCers go higher BUT I wanted an OC that would play all day solid. That was with appropriate added gpu/memory voltage.

The GTX980TI SC can add +150 core/350 mem without added voltage and run solid all day. OC to OC the benchies are higher on the 2 290s but not by much.

What I find amazing is replacing 2 cards for 1 with hardly any drop off AND getting much less power draw, heat 6G Vram vs 4G. The OP fails to mention this.
I wonder on the 670s what the power draw was? I'm sure not the same as my dual 290s but the 980TI is amazing -pricey but amazing.

Don't get me wrong. My 290s are ROCKS but suck voltage and produce heat like no tomorrow. They are Air Cooled now in my 3770k rig but they are staying stock.

PS: So RS, tell us how you like that BenQ BL3200PT?

I think it would be a bit more worth it if you had 2x 290x. I don't really see a point in 2x290s

 

[soccerballtux]

Part of the problem is feature creep though isn't it? They could make a single GPU 3x more powerful than a 980ti and within a couple of years developers will find a way to bog it down with "features" that aren't really even noticeable.

this is how I feel about game physics. I still haven't seen anything consistently better than HL2, and that ran fine on fast single core PCs, nor have I seen better than their speech engine, which frankly should be open sourced because I have yet to see anything as believable

 

[soccerballtux]

Ooh I so wish AAA developers would take their head out of their ass and started making those graphically NEXT GEN titles which we clearly lack atm. Community is doing better job at least:

GTA IV

It feels like original Crysis was the last next gen defining title and that came 8 years ago. All newer titles really haven't had the same kind of wow effect expect for couple of GTA IV and Skyrim mods.

wow, that's pretty amazing. What do you do in the world? I beat the game, and don't see a point in all the missions racking up more digital monies to do nothing. As much as I'd like to go see some titties with Roman, there wasn't really a point in continuing to exist in the world, to me at least. And the minigames weren't addicting [were they?] and didn't improve game progression significantly like I'm used to (heart pieces in Zelda were always awesome)

 

[soccerballtux]

I think Rockstar did a really good job on GTA V PC. Maybe not next gen defining, but the scope and detail of that game is incredibly impressive.

dude, you have a hilarious sig

 

[soccerballtux]

That last quote is looking at everything backwards. It isn't Nvidia that decides how well a GPU handles a game. It is the dev's who decide what settings they offer you based on what the GPU's of the time can handle at the typical resolutions used.

If AMD and Nvidia offered GPU's that were 400% more powerful than now, dev's would simply give you quality settings that would push them at 1080p, and you still couldn't max out many AAA games at 4K.

not exactly. to some extent, when they've sponsored development (Doom3 and UT3 come to mind), they have a solid idea of what kind of power they're going to need to deliver to hit 60fps, and the developers know what kind of power they can expect on launch day and create the game engine somewhat accordingly.

 

[bystander36]

not exactly. to some extent, when they've sponsored development (Doom3 and UT3 come to mind), they have a solid idea of what kind of power they're going to need to deliver to hit 60fps, and the developers know what kind of power they can expect on launch day and create the game engine somewhat accordingly.

If they release it before the cards are released, or not long after, sure, but otherwise, they'd just tune their internal sliders to use further views, higher levels of shadows and lighting, and what ever else they can. Those settings often exist, but just not exposed to us due to the level of GPU's that are out.

 

[DustinBrowder]

Why would games push graphics when we've had 4 years of stagnation is graphic speeds? The market place for such games is already small enough, look at Crysis 1, even the lowest settings required a beefy PC, so even though it was extremely hyped and expected game it needed 1 year to reach 1 million sales!

These days any huge leap in graphic fidelity would have ALL of the top cards running bellow 30fps at 1080p resolutions and higher that it would serve no point. You have a $700 dollar card to run at less than 30fps?

We actually need graphics hardware to catch up to the graphical fidelity that we have now. Even the top cards that cost $600 or $700 dollars can barely run The Witcher 3 at 1440p at highest settings. You still need to disable and/or numerous settings to be able to get a stable frame rate in the 50's.

You can't run a newer game on 1440p at highest settings and get a constant 60fps, a lot of games actually dip in the 30's with all settings cranked up. Lets not even talk about 4k, because its still a pipe dream.

When mid range graphic cards for $200 and less can max out The Witcher 3 at 1080p resolutions then we can talk about pushing graphics for games!

 

[soccerballtux]

If they release it before the cards are released, or not long after, sure, but otherwise, they'd just tune their internal sliders to use further views, higher levels of shadows and lighting, and what ever else they can. Those settings often exist, but just not exposed to us due to the level of GPU's that are out.

that's true, you're right.

Why would games push graphics when we've had 4 years of stagnation is graphic speeds? The market place for such games is already small enough, look at Crysis 1, even the lowest settings required a beefy PC, so even though it was extremely hyped and expected game it needed 1 year to reach 1 million sales!

These days any huge leap in graphic fidelity would have ALL of the top cards running bellow 30fps at 1080p resolutions and higher that it would serve no point. You have a $700 dollar card to run at less than 30fps?

We actually need graphics hardware to catch up to the graphical fidelity that we have now. Even the top cards that cost $600 or $700 dollars can barely run The Witcher 3 at 1440p at highest settings. You still need to disable and/or numerous settings to be able to get a stable frame rate in the 50's.

You can't run a newer game on 1440p at highest settings and get a constant 60fps, a lot of games actually dip in the 30's with all settings cranked up. Lets not even talk about 4k, because its still a pipe dream.

When mid range graphic cards for $200 and less can max out The Witcher 3 at 1080p resolutions then we can talk about pushing graphics for games!

I mean, they probably can, if you turn off the Hairworks

 

[bystander36]

Why would games push graphics when we've had 4 years of stagnation is graphic speeds? The market place for such games is already small enough, look at Crysis 1, even the lowest settings required a beefy PC, so even though it was extremely hyped and expected game it needed 1 year to reach 1 million sales!

These days any huge leap in graphic fidelity would have ALL of the top cards running bellow 30fps at 1080p resolutions and higher that it would serve no point. You have a $700 dollar card to run at less than 30fps?

We actually need graphics hardware to catch up to the graphical fidelity that we have now. Even the top cards that cost $600 or $700 dollars can barely run The Witcher 3 at 1440p at highest settings. You still need to disable and/or numerous settings to be able to get a stable frame rate in the 50's.

You can't run a newer game on 1440p at highest settings and get a constant 60fps, a lot of games actually dip in the 30's with all settings cranked up. Lets not even talk about 4k, because its still a pipe dream.

When mid range graphic cards for $200 and less can max out The Witcher 3 at 1080p resolutions then we can talk about pushing graphics for games!

You must have missed the part where I said, "If AMD and Nvidia offered GPU's that were 400% more powerful than now".

The point being, the dev's build games around the GPU power we have now. Sometimes even a little further. As long as dev's design games for 1080p, 4K will never be easily handled by a single card without having to turn down settings.

If you want 4K, just get it, and turn down the settings to accommodate it. There is going to be a compromise no matter what you choose. This is why PC games have settings. That way they can offer something for the top end cards, as well as those that are much slower.

I might also ask where you get this 4 years of stagnation. It's been 3 years since the 7970 and 680 came out. The 980 ti is over 50% faster.

 

[Timmah!]

Seeing how there's only been one node jump between your 590 and a 980 Ti, the gaming improvement itself is impressive. That's the key take away, is that it is a gaming card first. Maxwell actually stripped out certain compute functionality to make more room for transistors that make a difference in games. If you need a compute card, perhaps a Quadro is better suited?

I'm still blown away by my 980 Ti. But, I came from a GTX 275 so anything current gen is an improvement.

AFAIK the only compute properties the gaming cards lack in comparison to Teslas (not sure about Quadros) is the lack of double precision functionality. Which is something i, or better said my software does not need, therefore i dont really need uber-expensive "pro" card to make it faster.

If however what you say is true and current gaming cards (post Fermi) are stripped of some other compute capabilities even in single precision at the expense of gaming performance, its pretty sad after all the years of CUDA promotion and how the GPUs are going to be fully fledged computers on their own capable of more than displaying things....

 

[Sabrewings]

AFAIK the only compute properties the gaming cards lack in comparison to Teslas (not sure about Quadros) is the lack of double precision functionality. Which is something i, or better said my software does not need, therefore i dont really need uber-expensive "pro" card to make it faster.

If however what you say is true and current gaming cards (post Fermi) are stripped of some other compute capabilities even in single precision at the expense of gaming performance, its pretty sad after all the years of CUDA promotion and how the GPUs are going to be fully fledged computers on their own capable of more than displaying things....

They do still have single precision. Though, there are other differences between a Quadro and Geforce. Board level differences, BIOS differences, and driver differences all push a different type of workload through a compute card than a gaming card. As a result, a compute card sucks at gaming (though it can do it to some extent). Yes, a gaming card can compute but especially in the 900 series some of that functionality has been put on the back burner to streamline gaming performance on the same node. If memory serves, some of how the Kepler SMXs were redesigned into the Maxwell's SMMs affected raw compute performance.

My point is that you are measuring advancement by looking at a side feature that isn't the first purpose of the hardware.

 

[bystander36]

AFAIK the only compute properties the gaming cards lack in comparison to Teslas (not sure about Quadros) is the lack of double precision functionality. Which is something i, or better said my software does not need, therefore i dont really need uber-expensive "pro" card to make it faster.

If however what you say is true and current gaming cards (post Fermi) are stripped of some other compute capabilities even in single precision at the expense of gaming performance, its pretty sad after all the years of CUDA promotion and how the GPUs are going to be fully fledged computers on their own capable of more than displaying things....

The 600 and 700 series were indeed stripped of some basic compute abilities (the still have compute, they were just weak). The 900 series as returned a lot of their compute power back.

 

[Timmah!]

They do still have single precision. Though, there are other differences between a Quadro and Geforce. Board level differences, BIOS differences, and driver differences all push a different type of workload through a compute card than a gaming card. As a result, a compute card sucks at gaming (though it can do it to some extent). Yes, a gaming card can compute but especially in the 900 series some of that functionality has been put on the back burner to streamline gaming performance on the same node. If memory serves, some of how the Kepler SMXs were redesigned into the Maxwell's SMMs affected raw compute performance.

My point is that you are measuring advancement by looking at a side feature that isn't the first purpose of the hardware.

So what is current top Tesla/Quadro? I mean the same chip as used in 980Ti/Titan X? Or even better, 780Ti pro card comparable? I will check the OctaneBench results page, if anyone with such GPU posted results and if there is any difference/advantage on the Tesla/Quadro side over Geforce...

EDIT: OK, looked into it myself, M6000 is the latest Quadro, the same chip as Titan X. The Octanbench result: 124 points.

http://render.otoy.com/octanebench/summary_detail_item.php?systemID=1x+Quadro+M6000

980Ti > 125

http://render.otoy.com/octanebench/summary_detail_item.php?systemID=1x+GTX+980+Ti

M6000 is 5000 USD btw. But no doubt its splendid when it comes to displaying 3D models in softs like 3DsMax, Geforces suck at that big time, even with such a powerful GPU as 780Ti you get so much flickering, stuttering, etc... cause of shitty drivers. But when it comes to raytracing, clearly both cards are equal. So the lack of progress when it comes to computing does not only concern gaming cards...

 

[Sabrewings]

EDIT: OK, looked into it myself, M6000 is the latest Quadro, the same chip as Titan X. The Octanbench result: 124 points.

http://render.otoy.com/octanebench/summary_detail_item.php?systemID=1x+Quadro+M6000

980Ti > 125

http://render.otoy.com/octanebench/summary_detail_item.php?systemID=1x+GTX+980+Ti

M6000 is 5000 USD btw. But no doubt its splendid when it comes to displaying 3D models in softs like 3DsMax, Geforces suck at that big time, even with such a powerful GPU as 780Ti you get so much flickering, stuttering, etc... cause of shitty drivers. But when it comes to raytracing, clearly both cards are equal. So the lack of progress when it comes to computing does not only concern gaming cards...

In that case, I would venture a guess that the application you're using is otherwise limited. I'm not familiar with Octanebench, so I can't tell you what the possible cause might be. As you can see from the AT 980 ti review, it posts decent gains in other compute areas over the previous gens so I feel the problem probably doesn't lie in the hardware but software utilization. Again, it's primarily a gaming card so I view any compute performance as an added bonus and not it's primary metric.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9306/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-ti-review/15

 

[Innokentij]

I can not run Far Cry 4 in 1440p at 60fps with nvidia gameworks shadows it dips down to 30fps, without i get 100+ broken POS. Then again if i use any gamework the game crashes. I feel sad

 

[tential]

wow, that's pretty amazing. What do you do in the world? I beat the game, and don't see a point in all the missions racking up more digital monies to do nothing. As much as I'd like to go see some titties with Roman, there wasn't really a point in continuing to exist in the world, to me at least. And the minigames weren't addicting [were they?] and didn't improve game progression significantly like I'm used to (heart pieces in Zelda were always awesome)

It sucks when you want to play GTA 4 like that now and you can't because it's impossible to find all the mods with working links

 

[tential]

I can not run Far Cry 4 in 1440p at 60fps with nvidia gameworks shadows it dips down to 30fps, without i get 100+ broken POS. Then again if i use any gamework the game crashes. I feel sad

Lol, I was about to lol at you and tell you to get an Nvidia card or turn it off and stop whining.

Then I saw you have a GTX 980 Ti.....



This is why I don't like to play new games lol. The Witcher 2 is great right now. My first time through 1440p VSR. I could be at 4K but AMD purposely gimps the 290x/390x into 1800p VSR even though the card clearly is shown to work at 4K vsr. Which is exactly why I don't want the card. But anyways....

Ya, that sucks lol. I'd be disappointed about that. Nvidia really needs to do something about gameworks because when your flagship owners have to disable the feature and it causes issues with their hardware, that mentality trickles down to the rest of the users not liking it, and gameworks is something Nvidia seems to like and want to succeed. They should probably actually try to make sure it works successfully in some of these future big launches because I literally associate Gameworks with avoid the game at all costs....

 

[EndlessWargasm]

I could be at 4K but AMD purposely gimps the 290x/390x into 1800p VSR even though the card clearly is shown to work at 4K vsr.

Do the old down sampling tools not work any more?

Also in the case of witcher 2 you could just use ubersampling, it is essentially the same thing.

 

[kasakka]

Ooh I so wish AAA developers would take their head out of their ass and started making those graphically NEXT GEN titles which we clearly lack atm. Community is doing better job at least:

GTA IV

It feels like original Crysis was the last next gen defining title and that came 8 years ago. All newer titles really haven't had the same kind of wow effect expect for couple of GTA IV and Skyrim mods.

All these modded GTA IV look nice in stills (though the pictures you posted are IMO just desaturated and not impressive at all) but in movement usually don't look all that much better than the original. Some of the GTA IV visual mods were downright horrible with terrible black crush and oversaturation which some find impressive in screenshots. All GTA IV and V really need for visual improvement is to just tune the colors a bit (for example to get rid of the fog effect in GTA V), throw on a tiny bit of sharpening and that you can easily do with ReShade nowadays.

Bethesda engines did a lot better as people actually made very high res, high quality textures for those. It is actually amazing how much worse the initial effort from Bethesda is. All of their games require mods to fix crappy UI, less than stellar textures, downright wrong animations (like how weapons are held in Fallout) and somewhat crappy character models.

Graphics improvements in games have become more subtle. More accurate lighting and shadows are the main areas where we see improvement but models are at a point where throwing more polygons at them doesn't necessarily improve the visuals. By comparison something like Crysis 1 gave us unprecedented detail, scale and physics at the time. Now I think we need strong art direction and extremely talented graphic artists to make games look more impressive. Just from a tech point of view something like The Order on consoles isn't all THAT impressive, but it has really good looking assets (especially cloth looks great in that game) overall.

The one thing developers could do though is allow us to increase the line where higher detail is shown. This is actually a rather small circle around the player in many new games and you can easily see where that line ends. GTA V and Far Cry 4 it's sometimes jarringly obvious when shadows etc pop into view in front of the player.

 

[nitromullet]

Some interesting points being made about graphics advancements, pixel chasing, etc. Don't underestimate the effect that increased resolution can have on the look of a game.

BF4 on PC (4K) vs. PS4:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5mOek2k3xc

 

[Stg-Flame]

I know it's been a few days, but I just got back home.

Would someone mind giving me some pointers for overclocking my card? As in, what numbers should I be seeing for a decent overclock on the card I have?