NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB 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: On Crysis 3 at 3840×2160 the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 reference card averaged 21.07 FPS and we were running at 26.64 FPS on the GeForce GTX 980 Ti. Overclocking the GeForce GTX 980 Ti got our performance up to 33.18 FPS, but still a couple FPS behind the stock Radeon R9 295X2.

Benchmark Results: It is extremely tough to get identical FRAPS runs on Crysis 3, but you can get the general feel for the cards still in the chart above. The GeForce GTX 980 Ti drops below 25 FPS a number of times, so NVIDIA G-Sync display is still handy on even the top end cards to help smooth out performance.