To fully test the abilities of a given video card, we have used a blend of in-game benchmarks and custom recorded real world game benchmarking. For custom game play we have used FRAPS to record the minimum and average frame rates and to do so for a set period of time. All tests were run a minimum of four times and the scores are the average of all four runs.
All games were patched to their latest version. The OS was a fresh clean install of Windows 7 with all latest hotfixes, patches and updates applied. All games were tested at the two of the most popular resolutions of 1080P (1920×1080) and then again at 1440P (2560×1440). This means each game’s tested was run a minimum of 8 times: 4 @ 1080P and 4 @1440P. Before testing Unigine’s Valley benchmark was run for 15 minutes to ‘warm up’ the video card. This was done to ensure that long term performance and not short term performance is being illustrated.
The games used for testing were:
Sleeping Dogs
Metro: Last Light
BioShock Infinite
Crysis 3
Batman: Arkham Origins
Tomb Raider
Battliefield 4
Assassins Creed: Black Flag
Call of Duty: Ghosts
For stress testing we used Unigine’s Valley benchmark.
For overclocking we used either the manufactures included software overclocking program or if necessary EVGA’s Precision X program.
Drivers:
GeForce 350.12
AMD Catalyst: 14.12 Omega
Main Test System
Processor: Intel i7 5930K
Memory: 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-2666
Motherboard: Asus Sabertooth X99
Cooling: Noctua U12S
SSD: 1x Seagate 600 Pro 400GB, 2x Intel DC S3700 800GB SSDs.
Power Supply: Corsair AX860i
Monitor: Dell U2714H
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1
Synthetic Game Benchmarks
In the Synthetic Gaming Benchmarks section we will show a number of benchmark comparisons of the PNY GeForce XLR8 GTX 980 Pro and other comparable GPUs, using various benchmarks which come included with five popular modern PC games. This will illustrate how much performance this card has to offer. To ensure that long term performance is and not short term performance is illustrated 15 minutes of Unigine’s Valley benchmark was run to ‘warm up’ the video card. Only then were any tests run on the now warm video card.
Real World In-Game Benchmarks
In the Real Gaming Benchmarks section we will show a number of timed real world game play results using FRAPS and four popular modern PC games. This will illustrate how much performance the PNY GeForce XLR8 GTX 980 Pro has to offer and do so in a way which cannot be unduly skewed by driver ‘optimizations’ which have been included for the sole purpose of improving benchmark results. While not as common as it once was such optimizing is still not unheard of by either AMD or NVIDIA. Once again Unigine’s Valley benchmark was run for 15 minutes to ‘warm up’ the video card prior to testing.
