AMD Radeon R9 Nano Versus NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980

By Nathan Kirsch

Grand Theft Auto V

GTAV

Grand Theft Auto V, currently one of the hottest PC games, was finally released for the PC on April 14, 2015. Developed by Rockstar, it is set in 2013 and the city of Los Santos. It utilizes the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) which Rockstar has been using since 2006, with multiple updates for technology improvements.

GTA5-settings

GTA5-settings2

In Grand Theft Auto V we set the game to run with no MSAA with 16x AF and high image quality settings as we didn’t want the GPU to bottleneck the system too bad, but wanted a setup that your average gamer would actually play on. We used the games built-in benchmark utility to have at least one game we used that could be compared to your setup at home. We averaged all the five of the default benchmark runs and omitted the maximum values as those results are garbage for some reason.

gtav-1440

Benchmark Results: After running the games built-in benchmark and averaging the runs together we found that the AMD Radeon R9 Nano was faster (~75 FPS) than the GeForce GTX 980 (~68 FPS) on the average grame rates. The minimum frame rates were very close to one another.

gtav-2160

Benchmark Results: The GeForce GT 980 was averaging about 33 FPS versus 38 FPS on the Radeon R9 Nano in GTAV. The minimum frame rate on both cards dropped below 20 FPS and it was interesting to see the GeForce GTX 980 have a higher minimum frame rate.