NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 & 970 Maxwell GPU Reviews

3DMark Fire Strike has two benchmark modes: Normal mode runs at 1920x1080, while Extreme mode targets 2560x1440. GPU target frame buffer utilization for normal mode is 1GB and the benchmark uses tessellation, ambient occlusion, volume illumination, and a medium-quality depth of field filter. The more taxing Extreme mode targets 1.5GB of frame buffer memory and increases detail levels across the board. Extreme mode is explicitly designed for CrossFire / SLI systems. GT 1 focuses on geometry and illumination, with over 100 shadow casting spot lights, 140 non-shadow casting point lights, and 3.9 million vertices calculated for tessellation per frame. And 80 million pixels are processed per frame. GT2 emphasizes particles and GPU simulations. Tessellation volume is reduced to 2.6 million vertices and the number of pixels processed per frame rises to 170 million.

3DMark Fire Strike

Once again, the GeForce GTX 980 outpaced all of the other single-GPU powered card. And when running in a dual-card SLI configuration, it was the fastest overall--bar none. The GeForce GTX 970 was also able to overtake the GeForce GTX 780 Ti and finish right alongside the Radeon R9 290X.