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Arma 3

Last but not least, we turn to a new title — and the rather strange saga of Arma 3.

Arma 3 is a game that several of you have been asking me to add. It released just over a year ago and is currently on Version 1.28, with 1.30 in the works. There’s no formal benchmark but users have created several — I gave them a run to see what kind of results we’d get. What we got is rather odd to say the least. Either I chose two entirely CPU-centric tests by accident or there are problems with the admittedly pre-1.0 benchmarks.

I’ve only shown 1080p results for two different demos here because the 4K results were decidedly wonky. At Ultra Detail — detail settings that should definitely be stretching the graphics cards — all of them are clustered around 47 fps in one test and 40 fps for the other. The results were consistent; we ran the test multiple times and rebooted between runs.

I don’t want to say much about these results yet, but since I ran the tests I thought I’d include them. One thing to be aware of is that ARMA 3 and 4K don’t get along particularly well — the mouse stops tracking the UI properly, even if the 30Hz 4K option is used.

Compute benchmarks

Enough gaming. How about compute? AMD has historically dominated Nvidia in this segment; Kepler’s high parallelism requirements made it more difficult for the chip to excel in many areas.

Luxmark shows the tremendous performance potential of the Maxwell architecture. The GTX 980 is nearly 3x faster than the GTX 680, and comes within a whisker of challenging the Radeon R9 290X. AMD’s lead has grown whisker-thin — and if you consider the chips in terms of performance/watt, it’s not even close.

RatGPU is a small OpenCL ray tracing program that runs on a wide range of compatible cards. Up until now, AMD has utterly dominated this benchmark and the new Maxwell cards don’t necessarily erase that trend — but they do punch an ugly hole through it. The GTX 980 is twice the speed of the GTX 680.

Next, we have Arionbench, a CUDA-only rendering program. AMD’s chips can’t run the test, so this is a GeForce-only show.

The gap between card families isn’t as pronounced in CUDA as it was for OpenCL, but the GTX 980 is still 1.47x faster than the older GTX 680.

Last but not least we have Litecoin mining. Historically, Litecoin and Bitcoin mining were two of AMD’s strongest wins over Nvidia hardware. A CUDA-specific mining program, written by Cbuchner, gave Kepler-based hardware a significant shot in the arm, but even there AMD ruled supreme in both raw performance and performance per watt. While Litecoin mining is much less profitable than it once was, it remains a useful benchmark of raw compute capability.

Litecoin mining is an interesting compute test for these cards because it gives us a chance to isolate some of the differences between Maxwell and Kepler. We originally theorized that NV’s LTC mining performance was crippled by a limited number of GPU front-ends (just eight for the GTX 680) and its lack of a right shift rotation function in hardware. The funnel shifter in GK110 alleviated both problems to some degree — and, in fact, when you factor these new features into Maxwell and account for its greater overall efficiency, the new GM204 is closing in on AMD in terms of performance per watt.

AMD remains the raw performance leader, but its ratio of 2.00 KH/s per watt is only slightly higher than the GTX 980’s 1.92.

A quick note on overclocking

These graphics cards arrived at the ExtremeTech bunker just a couple of days ago, giving us next to no chance to evaluate their overclocking potential. A quick test showed both cards have enormous potential with maximum clock speeds of ~1500MHz — and that was achieved without even a voltage tap. If you’re an enthusiast looking to push a GPU, the Zotac Omega GTX 970 may be just the card to buy.

Next page: Conclusion