Then And Now_ Five Generations Of GeForce Graphics Compared

It may not seem like it, but we’ve been gaming on DirectX 11 graphics hardware for half a decade. The AMD Radeon HD 5870 arrived in September 2009, while Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 480 shipped six months later — a trivial delay considering there were so few DX11 games available at the time. The first game to support DX11 was EA’s Battleforge in early 2009, a real-time strategy title that tanked big time, selling less than 100,000 copies and eventually becoming a freemium title. More to the point, the DX11 designation was used to hype the product and virtually offered no eye candy to justify the moniker.cnx.cmd.push(function(){cnx({"playerId":"e3616d04-4972-4839-a63a-c6975e2e9731","settings":{"advertising":{"macros":{"AD_UNIT":"/23178111854/od.kotaku.com/article","CHILD_UNIT":"article","POST_ID":"1674019782","POST_TYPE":"post","CHANNEL":"uncategorized","SECTION":"","SUBSECTION":"","CATEGORIES":"uncategorized","TAGS":"","NOP":"0"},"timeBeforeFirstAd":0}}}).render("cnx-player-main")}); It wasn’t until 2011 that we started to see games that truly took advantage of the API. Today, most big titles use DX11 thoroughly, and while some offer backward compatibility for DX10, games including The Crew, Far Cry 4, Battlefield 4, and many others use DX11 exclusively. Upon arrival of every new graphics processor, we usually compare them to their predecessor but rarely go back more than one generation. However, considering how far DX11 support has come and how many driver optimizations there have been, we’d like a better look at past and present performance. Many of you who haven’t upgraded GPUs in a year, two, or even more may be pleased to see how performance scales and what to expect in modern games. Before we jump to the benchmarks, here’s a comparison table of the six GPUs we’ll be testing. The list includes three major Nvidia architectures released between March 2010 and September 2014: Fermi ( GTX 480 and GTX 580), Kepler (GTX 680 and GTX 780), and the company’s most recent GPU architecture, Maxwell (GTX 980). GeForce GTX 480 GTX 580 GTX 680 GTX 780 GTX 780 Ti GTX 980 Codename GF100 GF100 GK104 GK110 GK110 GM204 Fab (nm) 40 40 28 28 28 28 Transistors (Billion) 3 3 3.54 7.08 7.08 5.2 Die size (mm2) 529 520 294 561 561 398 SPU 480 512 1536 2304 2880 2048 TAU 60 64 128 192 240 128 ROP 48 48 32 48 48 64 Memory (MB) 1536 1536 2048 3072 3072 4096 Bus width (bit) 384 384 256 384 384 256 Bandwidth (GB/s) 177.4 192.3 192.2 288.4 336.4 224 Release date Mar-10 Nov-10 Mar-12 May-13 Nov-13 Oct-14 Price at release $500 $500 $500 $650 $700 $550 The GTX 480, GTX 580 and GTX 680 were clearly the single-GPU flagships for their series, while the GTX 780 was really an extension of the GTX 600 range and when it landed it was second only to the GTX Titan (excluded from this write-up because at $1,000 it was on a different class and hardly made sense to the average gamer for the price). Six months after the GTX 780 shipped we got an even faster GTX 700 series GPU, the GTX 780 Ti, and then we arrive at the current flagship, the GTX 980. u31.com เข้าสู่ระบบ Although the GTX 980 isn’t the end of the road for Maxwell with the GTX 980 Ti expected next year, it will be in a similar position to the GTX 780. Testing Methodology Although we collected frame time data in our testing, we haven’t included it because it’s less important for single GPU reviews. Frame time data will still be included in our CrossFireX and SLI reviews. For this review we tested at 1366×768, 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 resolutions. We are yet to incorporate 4K resolution benchmarks in our reviews because there isn’t a single GPU solution available that provides playable performance at this resolution. System Specs Intel Core i7-4790K (3.60GHz) x2 4GB Crucial DDR3-2400 (CAS 11-13-13-28) Asrock Z97 Extreme6 (Intel Z97) OCZ ZX Series (1250W) Samsung SSD 850 Pro 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 (4096MB) Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 Ti (3072MB) Gainward GeForce GTX 780 (3072MB) Gainward GeForce GTX 680 (2048MB) Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB) Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 (1536MB) Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit Nvidia GeForce 344.75 WHQL Benchmarks: Crysis 3, BioShock Starting with the 1080p results, the GeForce GTX 480 was good for just 27fps in Crysis 3. Remember all forms of anti-aliasing were disabled, so this is a weak result, though not unexpected from the almost five-year-old flagship part. The jump from the GTX 480 to the GTX 580 saw a mere 15% increase in performance while the upgrade from the GTX 580 to the GTX 680 was much more impressive with the GTX 680 delivering 45% more performance with 45fps. The GTX 780 also delivered a respectable 20% more performance than the GTX 680. Although the GTX 780 Ti and GTX 780 are of the same family we still saw a 13% increase in performance which was a similar gain from the GTX 480 to the GTX 580. Finally the weakest performance gain was seen from the new GTX 980 which was just 8% faster than the GTX 780 Ti. Boosting the resolution to 2560×1600 provided similar performance margins, though this time the GTX 980 was 11% faster than the GTX 780 Ti. The GTX 480 managed a playable 47fps at 1080p in BioShock Infinite while the GTX 580 was 19% faster with 56fps. Moving from the GTX 580 to the GTX 680 produced a massive 43% performance increase. Likewise, GTX 780 provided strong gains over the GTX 680 with 29% more frames and the GTX 780 Ti was 11% faster than the vanilla GTX 780. As we saw when testing Crysis 3 the GTX 980 was only marginally faster than the GTX 780 Ti, this time 10% faster. Again increasing the resolution to 2560×1600 had little impact on performance, though keep in mind anti-aliasing was disabled. Benchmarks: Metro Redux, Tomb Raider The GTX 480 delivered 28fps at 1080p in Metro Redux while the GTX 580 only offered 4fps (14%) more. The performance jump from the GTX 580 to the GTX 680 was much larger, though at 34% it wasn’t quite as significant as the 40% plus gains seen in Crysis 3 and BioShock. Next we have the GTX 780 which was 28% faster than the GTX 680, while the GTX 780 Ti was 13% faster than the GTX 780. Alhtough we saw gains of 10% or less when comparing the GTX 980 to the GTX 780 Ti in Crysis 3 and BioShock, we find rather different results when testing with Metro Redux as the GTX 980 was 27% faster than the GTX 780 Ti, hitting 79fps. This margin was reduced to 21% in favor of the GTX 980 at 2560×1600, while most of the other figures remained within a 3%~ margin. Tomb Raider was playable on the GTX 480 at 1080p with anti-aliasing disabled. Nonetheless, with the GTX 480 only offering 31fps, the GTX 580’s 19% performance bump wouldn’t go unnoticed. Again, the GTX 680 provided a significant jump from the GTX 580, as we saw 43% more performance in Tomb Raider. This time the GTX 780 was 32% faster than the GTX 680 while the GTX 780 Ti was 14% faster, and the GTX 980 was just 10% faster u31 ทางเข้า than the GTX 780 Ti with 8fps more. Interestingly, boosting the resolution to 2560×1600 went in favor of the GTX 780 Ti as the current flagship GTX 980 was just 4% faster. Read More: Benchmarks: Sleeping Dogs, Battlefield 4 u31 เข้าสู่ระบบ Benchmarks: Thief, Watch Dogs Benchmarks: Dragon Age: Inquisition, The Crew Power Consumption Wrap Up: 5 Years of GeForce Graphics, in a Graph Republished with permission from: Steven Walton is a writer at TechSpot. TechSpot is a computer technology publication serving PC enthusiasts, gamers and IT pros since 1998.