NVIDIA GeForce GeForce GTX 980 Maxwell Video Card Review

Crysis 3

Like the others, it is a first-person shooter developed by Crytek, using their CryEngine 3. Released in February 2013, it is well known to make even powerful system choke. It has probably the highest graphics requirements of any game available today. Unfortunately, Crytek didnt include a standardized benchmark with Crysis 3. While the enemies will move about on their own, we will attempt to keep the same testing process for each test.

Crysis 3 has a reputation for being highly resource intensive. Most graphics cards will have problems running Crysis 3 at maximum settings, so we settled on no AA with the graphics quality mostly set to Very High with 16x AF. We disabled v-sync and left the motion blur amount on medium.

Crysis 3 appeared to run for the most part on just 3 CPU threads and used up about 15-18% of our Intel Core i7-4960X processor with these settings. Notice that the processor speed was at 3.53GHz and we very seldom, if ever, saw the processor go into turbo mode on Crysis 3.

Benchmark Results: TheNVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 reference card really struggles on Crysis 3 at 3840×2160 and can only average 12 FPS. The new GeForce GTX 980 reference card is at nearly 20 FPS, so there is a big difference between the two cards on Crysis 3. The GeForce GTX 780 also gets beat, but the GeForce GTX 780 Ti that we are using has a nice factory overclock on it and was actually faster than the GeForce GTX 980 once again.

Benchmark Results: It is extremely tough to get identical FRAPS runs on Crysis 3, but nothing out of the ordinary here.