Performance Charts & Conclusion

Performance summary charts

Here are the summary charts of 35 games and 2 synthetic tests. The highest settings are always chosen. The benches were run at 1920×1080, 2560×1440, and at 3840×2160. All results show average framerates in bold and the minimums are next to them in italics, and higher is always better. “X” means the benchmark would not run.

The first column is devoted to the GTX 980 Ti results and the Fury X results are compared in Column 2. “Wins” are based on averages and the higher performing card’s framerates are in yellow text unless there is a tie in which case both sets of results will be yellow.

The charts may be opened in separate windows or tabs for better viewing.

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The GTX 980 Ti is now even faster than the Fury X for the majority of our games. Out of 105 individual benches, the Fury X only wins 26 and ties two. Two years ago, AMD won 29 out of 108 benches, but in many cases its performance was much closer to the GTX 980 Ti’s.

It appears that AMD may no longer be longer prioritizing vRAM optimization for Fury X, and in a few cases, its performance has fallen off of a cliff at higher resolutions compared with its NVIDIA competitor.

A couple of games proved problematic for AMD on our test PC. Wolfenstein crashed when the Steam screenshot function was enabled, and The Crew 2 also frequently crashed and would not run at all at 2560×1440. The GTX 980 Ti crashed above 1920×1080 resolution benching Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation. Generally both cards are still very capable at 1920×1080 and even at 2560×1440 if some detail settings are lowered.

Let’s head for our conclusion.

The Conclusion

As in all of our previous evaluations, the GTX 980 Ti is generally faster than the Fury X. Nothing has really changed over the past 2 years, although the Fury X has lost even more ground to the GTX 980 Ti, only winning 26 individual benchmarks out of the 105 games that we tested. There were a few driver issues with both cards but mostly they performed well in modern games. In some cases, the resolution may need to be lowered to 1920×1080 to maintain fluid play at maximum settings, or detail settings may need to be lowered to play at higher resolutions.

As before, if overclocking is taken into consideration, the GTX 980 Ti runs away from the Fury X which is a very poor overclocker. AMD’s “fine wine” theory has apparently not turned out so well for the Fury X.

If you currently game at 4K on an older generation video card, you will do yourself a big favor by upgrading. The move to a Pascal or Vega card will give you better performance although the GTX 980 Ti and the Fury X are still powerful video cards just below the GTX 1070/Vega 56 class. Our follow-up evaluation on Monday will pit the GTX 980 Ti against the GTX 1070 to see if NVIDIA has neglected Maxwell in favor of Pascal.

Stay tuned, there is a lot more coming from us at BTR. After we post our GTX 980 Ti vs. GTX 1070 evaluation, we will return to VR benching with a series featuring the Vive Pro versus the Oculus Rift using FCAT-VR to measure the performance of 25 of your favorite VR games.

Don’t forget to check BTR forums. Our tech discussions are among the best to be found anywhere!

Happy Gaming!

Contents 1. Intro

2. Test Configuration

3. Performance Charts & Conclusion