Today we're revisiting an old friend, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti and we're doing so with a 36 game benchmark covering the 1080p and 1440p resolutions. We're especially interested to see how information technology performs confronting more than modernistic GPUs like the GTX 1070 and the GeForce RTX 2060. So in a way we suppose you could telephone call this more of a GTX 980 Ti vs. GTX 1070 vs. RTX 2060 examination.

Almost a year ago nosotros reviewed the RTX 2060 for the first time. We happened to miss the official launch because Nvidia "lost" our sample in the mail but that meant we didn't accept to blitz our tests and we ended up with the full grunter and provided a massive 36 game examination.

Looking dorsum at that information, nosotros constitute that the RTX 2060 was able to vanquish the GTX 1070 Ti by a slim margin, making it 13% faster than the vanilla GTX 1070. We didn't include older GPUs at the time similar the GTX 980 Ti, so the Maxwell-based flagship was absent from that feature. It will exist interesting to see if those margins take changed, while also taking a look at how much faster the RTX 2060 is when compared to the GTX 980 Ti.

The GTX 980 Ti was released back in mid-2015 for $650 and the RTX 2060 in early 2019 for $350. That makes the mod Turing GPU three and a half years newer and most 50% cheaper. The 980 Ti was a beast of a GPU, it shared the same 601mm2 die with the Titan X and although not all SM units were enabled, it all the same packed an impressive 2816 CUDA cores, 6GB of GDDR5 memory on a 384-bit wide memory bus, and enjoyed a memory bandwidth of 336.five GB/s.

A year afterwards the GTX 1070 arrived and although it packed simply 1920 CUDA cores -- 32% fewer than the 980 Ti -- thanks to a ~sixty% increase in clock speed, performance ended up beingness very like and this was largely due to Nvidia moving from TSMC's 28nm process to what at the fourth dimension was their latest 16nm manufacturing.

The jump to the 12nm process with the RTX 2060 was less extreme, only here we got an entirely new architecture. Notably, the RTX 2060 die is 42% larger than the GTX 1070 and although the core count has but increased by a piddling over ten%, the cores are much wider and back up technologies such as real-time ray tracing.

Despite the massive increment in die size, Nvidia sold the RTX 2060 for a little less than the Pascal-based GTX 1070. In a way they had to, equally the newer GPU had more features but was just marginally faster. Turing is the more modern architecture, featuring meliorate support for DX12 and Vulkan. And then again, it'll exist interesting to see if that margin has grown and where -- in other words, which games are favoring Turing today.

Our exam setup consists of the MSI GTX 980 Ti Gaming (graphics carte du jour names were a little simpler back then) pitted against the MSI RTX 2060 Gaming Z and GTX 1070 Gaming X. Powering the GPU test rig is the Intel Core i9-9900K overclocked to five GHz with 16GB of DDR4-3400 retention. As usual, rather than having 36 private graphs, we'll look at about a dozen of the more than interesting games and and then jump into the operation breakdown graphs. For the discussion, we'll be focusing on the 1440p results...

Benchmarks

Doom Eternal is an interesting game to start with equally it makes heavy use of async compute and this is a technology neither the Maxwell or Pascal architectures were able to utilize at the hardware level.

At 1440p the fundamental advantage the GTX 1070 has over the 980 Ti is the 8GB VRAM buffer, that and what is likely improve commuter optimization. The stop issue means the 980 Ti was almost twenty% slower. All the same it's the RTX 2060 and it's more modern compages that really excels in this title, reaching almost 100 fps on boilerplate and that meant the 980 Ti was 31% slower.

It's also worth noting that the 2060 makes out even better at 1080p as the 980 Ti is besides limited to a 6GB retentivity buffer. Whereas information technology was 18% faster than the GTX 1070 at 1440p, it's a whopping 36% faster at 1080p as the retentivity constraints are less of an issue at this lower resolution.

Moving to Resident Evil iii we notice a situation where the GTX 1070 is no faster than the GTX 980 Ti. If anything, information technology'due south a little slower. This was as well the instance with Resident Evil 2 -- both games use the same engine and look very similar.

With 68 fps on average at 1440p, the 980 Ti fairs very well in this title. The RTX 2060 was faster, but this time past but a thirteen% margin, then while that is certainly progress, information technology's non a ton of information technology.

Where we do see a significant stride frontward for the Turing based GPU is in Rainbow Six Siege. Here the RTX 2060 was a whopping 35% faster than the GTX 980 Ti and nigh twoscore% faster than the GTX 1070.

Rainbow Vi Siege is a compute-heavy championship and previously this meant AMD's fifth gen GCN products walked all over Nvidia's Pascal GPUs, such every bit the GTX 1070. However the upgraded Turing cores tackled that weakness and now information technology'due south Nvidia who enjoys an advantage in this title, fifty-fifty when compared to Radeon Navi GPUs.

The bound forward seen hither is incredible, though it has to exist said, with 79 fps on boilerplate the GTX 980 Ti even so delivered impressive performance at 1440p.

The 980 Ti as well performs very well in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, spitting out over 60 fps at all times during our test, for an average of 81 fps. It was likewise only vii% slower than the GTX 1070, though it did trail the much newer RTX 2060 by a 24% margin.

The RTX 2060 does perform well in this championship, even at 1440p and a 23% performance uplift over the GTX 1070 is certainly nothing to sneeze at.

This game besides supports ray tracing and is therefore heavily optimized for Turing. We've witnessed Pascal GPUs such as the GTX 1060 performing quite poorly relative to competitors, in this case the RX 580. So while we're sure Turing improvements help here, we'd wager that commuter optimization is playing its office as well.

The GTX 980 Ti performed well in F1 2019 using the new DX12 manner, here it was only eleven% slower than the GTX 1070, but more importantly was able to provide smooth playable performance at 1440p with 76 fps on boilerplate. The RTX 2060 was 32% faster and 18% faster than the GTX 1070, so a reasonable performance uplift in this latest F1 championship.

Fortnite also supports DX12 now and using this API we see comparable operation betwixt the GTX 980 Ti and GTX 1070 at 1440p using the maximum quality preset. For competitive-type quality settings either will work but fine.

The RTX 2060 does offer a 23% functioning boost and perhaps non the kind of gain you'd expect to meet in this title.

Another popular battle royale game where the GTX 1070 and 980 Ti are evenly matched. Both GPUs average but over lxx fps. The RTX 2060 was nearly 20% faster at 1440p, which is a strong operation atomic number 82 and certainly not a bad generation-on-generation performance uplift.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider remains a visually impressive game even when information technology's been xviii months since it launched. As you can meet it'southward a demanding one, even at 1440p. Here the 980 Ti failed to achieve a 60 fps average, as did the GTX 1070, both rendering just over 50 fps. This fabricated the 23% heave offered by the RTX 2060 quite noticeable.

World State of war Z is even so another championship where the GTX 1070 and 980 Ti are very evenly matched and it's some other title where both easily push above 60 fps at 1440p using the maximum in game quality settings. The RTX 2060 was around 18% faster so a reasonable performance uplift in that location, but it has to be said the 980 Ti hardly looks outdated.

The Gears 5 results are interesting, the GTX 1070 is clearly faster than the 980 Ti at 1080p, offer a 12% performance upgrade. However at 1440p the results come up together and hither the 1070 is but half dozen% faster, verging on a margin of error-type deviation. The RTX 2060 is just thirteen% faster than the GTX 1070, though we come across a similar margin between the 2 at both tested resolutions.

Ghost Recon Breakpoint has recently been updated to support Vulkan and this has led to big operation gains for modern GeForce GPUs -- gains of up to xx%.

It seems clear that Nvidia has not optimized for the 980 Ti and Maxwell as the GTX 1070 was a whopping 18% faster at 1440p. A similar upshot to what we saw with another new championship, Doom Eternal.

Last upward nosotros take Earth of Tanks and every bit is often the case with older titles, we run into very little departure in performance betwixt the 3 GPUs, particularly at 1440p. We're talking a x% or lower margin betwixt the slowest and fastest GPU. This tin can be attributed to better driver optimization for older GPUs and or the disability to take advantage of modern features supported by newer GPUs.

For the most part the GTX 980 Ti still looks to be handling itself rather well, though there are some titles such as Ghost Recon Breakpoint, which appear to lack proper driver optimization and therefore volition require gamers to reduce graphics settings for smooth performance at 1440p. Since we've only looked at a dozen of the tested games, let's see how these GPUs compared across all 36 games.

Functioning Breakdown

At 1080p, the GTX 980 Ti was on boilerplate 5% slower than the GTX 1070. The only outlier here was The Segmentation ii where the 980 Ti was for 26% slower for some reason.

Removing that result changes the average by a single pct, making the 980 Ti ~4% slower. For the almost function, you're looking at little to no difference betwixt these two GPUs, 21 of the 36 games tested saw a margin of 5% or less which we typically deem a draw.

Moving to 1440p reduces the margin to four% and removing The Division 2 doesn't change annihilation in that average. 22 of the 36 games saw a margin of 5% difference or less, which confirms these GPUs are very evenly matched.

When compared to the RTX 2060, the GTX 980 Ti was 20% slower on average at 1080p. The Division two forth with Doom Eternal are weak titles for the Maxwell role.

The quondam GTX 980 Ti trails the RTX 2060 by a like margin at 1440p. For this match up information technology was nineteen% slower on average. Certainly it'due south on the more demanding, newer, or more than technically advanced games where the RTX 2060 gets away from the GTX 980 Ti.

The margins are much smaller in titles such as World of Tanks, State of war Thunder, For Honor and Resident Evil three, for example. Whereas they're quite considerable in titles such as Doom Eternal, The Segmentation ii, Control, Dirt Rally 2.0, Strange Brigade, Rainbow Half-dozen Siege, Red Dead Redemption 2, Assassin'due south Creed Odyssey, Call of Duty: Modernistic Warfare, and well... a few others, you get the indicate.

What Nosotros Learned

While the GTX 980 Ti is starting to show its age, the once mighty flagship GPU still has some fight in information technology, which is great to come across. We have to acknowledge, the initial intention of this benchmark session was to investigate how well the 980 Ti stacked upwards against the newer GTX 1070 in 2020, we ofttimes found ourselves more interested in the battle between the GTX 1070 and RTX 2060.

Only nosotros'll terminate ourselves from jumping right to that and talk a little more about the 980 Ti versus the GTX 1070. Last time we compared these ii head to caput in a large range of games the 980 Ti was actually 1% faster or basically identical and that's still mostly true today. The games that tipped the results in the 1070's favor include The Segmentation 2, Ghost Recon Breakpoint and Doom Eternal.

None of those titles were tested before and in our opinion the 980 Ti probably shouldn't exist that much slower, so we suspect this is a result of Nvidia failing to optimize for older hardware.

The GTX 980 Ti is 5 years old now and we're pretty confident that Nvidia abandons all optimizations around the half-dozen year quondam mark. This tin can exist seen when looking at Kepler-based GPUs. We doubtable we're getting to a bespeak where the GeForce 900 series volition start to autumn away in newer titles. If you happen to be second-hand shopping, keep that in mind.

Lets at present shift gears to the RTX 2060...

Upon release we found it was ~13% faster than the GTX 1070. In today's exam the RTX 2060 was 20% faster on average, so which games are responsible for the overall improvement in performance?

The biggest correspondent is Control, a newer championship that wasn't role of the previous exam. Control is also an Nvidia sponsored title and a great deal of time has been invested into making sure RTX series GPUs deliver maximum performance, largely so ray tracing doesn't outcome in a complete slideshow.

Interestingly, Strange Brigade performance has also been dramatically improved and this title does brand use of async compute. Although not a popular title, information technology is oftentimes used for benchmarking, and so it doesn't surprise me that Nvidia has made an endeavor to optimize operation for Turing-based GPUs here.

The RTX 2060 was as well 39% faster in Rainbow 6 Siege, but that's not much unlike to the 33% win it enjoyed using the older DX11 version. Nvidia has optimized Turing for Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, originally the 2060 was 20% faster, now with upgraded drivers and multiple game patches, information technology's 33% faster. Blood-red Dead Redemption 2 is another new game that massively favors the 2060.

Between new games that better employ mod GPUs and Nvidia's focus on commuter optimizations for Turing, the RTX 2060 has been able to further distance itself from the GTX 1070 and consequently the GTX 980 Ti. For those of y'all still rocking the GTX 980 Ti, overall we'd say it's holding up well and y'all're probably reasonably satisfied with the experience, but we suspect it'll start to autumn away now and upcoming generations should see information technology outpaced for around $200.

The GeForce GTX 1070 is even so a solid purchase simply with Nvidia focusing its attention on Turing and time to come generations supporting ray tracing and DLSS, it'll be interesting to run into how well Pascal ages over the adjacent few years. No doubt, nosotros'll have plenty more benchmark content in the future that will monitor the situation.

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