There’s never been a more glorious time to be a PC gamer. Once regarded as the red-headed stepchild of games, more and more titles have begun calling the PC home, thanks to the rise of Steam and the inclusion of AMD hardware in both next-generation consoles, which makes porting efforts easier.
But the power inside the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are roughly equivalent to a mid-range modern gaming rig—meaning they can’t hold a flame to the glorious visual excess today’s top graphics cards can pump out. The PC offers today’s best gaming experiences, period.
This week we’re going to bask in that. Over the coming days, we’re going to showcase a trio of fire-breathing PC builds celebrating the best that Intel, Nvidia, and AMD have to offer. On Friday, we’ll showcase the PC games that melt eyeballs and push hardware to extremes. But today, we’ll kick things off by comparing the most powerful single-GPU graphics cards available today: Nvidia’s GTX 980 and 970 versus AMD’s Radeon R9 290X and R9 290.
Let the benchmarks begin!
The hardware we’re using
If you’re looking for nitty-gritty architectural details for these cards, you’ll have to look elsewhere; this article is dedicated to raw performance, pricing, and highlight features. You know, real-world worries. But fear not: PCWorld’s intro articles for the R9 290, R9 290X, and Nvidia’s recently launched 900-series cards can get you up to speed on ROPs and memory clockspeeds.
Our GTX 970 is a special case. While AMD and Nvidia provided reference cards of the R9 290, R9 290X, and GTX 980, Nvidia didn’t create physical reference cards for the GTX 970. EVGA graciously provided PCWorld with an EVGA GeForce GTX 970 FTW with ACX 2.0 (whew!) for testing.
The EVGA GTX 970 FTW utilizes a large heat sink under a pair of large fans, and the ACX cooling set-up has been redesigned from previous versions to provide more cooling oomph with less fan noise and a reduced power draw. That lets you get more substantial overclocks, which in turn boosts performance. In fact, the EVGA GTX 970 FTW comes with a beastly overclock already put in place at the factory—1216MHz core clock and 1367MHz boost clock—and ships with EVGA’s vaunted PrecisionX overclocking software if you want to push it even further.
The extra performance comes at a price, of course: The EVGA GTX 970 FTW costs $370, or $40 more than the MSRP for “stock” GTX 970 cards. But every available GTX 970 card features some variance in cooling technology and clock speed, given the lack of an official Nvidia reference model.
Testing such beastly graphics cards requires a similarly face-melting test bench. We’re using Intel’s top-of-the-line $999 Core i7-5960X, an 8-core Haswell-E processor with hyperthreading, 20MB of cache, and 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes. It’ll eliminate any possibility whatsoever that CPU bottlenecks will affect benchmarks. We paired it with the Asus X99 Deluxe motherboard, 16GB of Corsair’s bleeding-edge Vengeance DDR4 memory, a 480GB Intel 730-series SSD, a closed-loop CPU cooler, a 1200W power supply, and a case also provided by Corsair. (Look for full details tomorrow when we show you how to build the rig.)
By the numbers
But enough spec talk! Let’s dig into frame rates.
You’ll notice a trend as we work our way through these: Nvidia’s new cards—even the overclocked GTX 970—soundly beat AMD’s top-end hardware when it comes to pure frame rates. That’s not incredibly surprising, since Nvidia’s “Big Maxwell” GPU architecture was revealed mere weeks ago, while AMD’s R-series cards are going on a year old. There’s more to this debate than pure graphics performance, however, which we’ll cover after the raw numbers.
A quick note: All Radeon R9 290X figures are in “Uber” mode. Transitioning the card to “Quiet” mode usually only resulted in about a 1 frame-per-second difference in our tests.
We’ll start with our old standby, Bioshock Infinite, an Unreal Engine 3 title. Modern high-end cards easily handle Columbia’s floating cities, but it allows us to see how today’s graphics hardware treats games that aren’t utter benchmark hogs—and we can compare the results against PCWorld’s stable of systems benchmarked in the past couple of years.
Next up we have Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition and Metro: Last Light Redux, two recent remakes of demanding games with built-in benchmark features. First up, Sleeping Dogs.
Note that we test Metro: Last Light with SSAA filtering disabled, since it looks gorgeous enough as-is and—more importantly—enabling it effectively drops frame rates in half. You very likely wouldn’t play Metro with SSAA active, and we won’t test it with SSAA active, either. We also disable Advanced PhysX. All graphics cards deliver respectable frame rates, but again, the GTX 900-series comes away with the overall win.
