The Nvidia GeForce RTX 980 Benchmark Review: A Look Back at the 10-Year Old Flagship

I recently decided to put my Nvidia GeForce RTX 980 through its paces with some popular games and benchmarks, and I was pleased to see that it still holds up quite well today. To start off, I had a look at the 50 and 40 FPS frame rates in crowded areas or areas with more traffic going on. In these scenarios, I did notice a few little dips and drops here and there, but the averages were still pretty solid. For example, the average 50 FPS was around 47, while the average 40 FPS was around 41. This is impressive considering that this is a 10-year old flagship model, and it's even more impressive when you consider that I purchased it for just £65.

One of the first games I tested was Mafia Definitive Edition. I set the game to high settings across the board, with a few personal preferences turned off, including chromatic aberration and motion blur. The result was an average frame rate of 64 FPS, with a 1% low of 49. These results were very smooth, with only a couple of minor hitches when loading into the game. As I recall, these occur around the safe house and garage area, but once you've driven out of that area, everything smooths out again.

Next up was Resident Evil 4. This is a demo, and while I haven't purchased the full game yet, I thought it would be an interesting test to run. I set the game to 1080p with the prioritized performance preset, which makes some sacrifices in terms of visual fidelity but still delivers great performance. The result was an average frame rate of 75 FPS, with a 1% low of 60. While there were a couple of major stutters or micro-stutters when switching between different areas of the game, these only lasted for a few milliseconds and didn't seem to have any significant impact on the overall gaming experience.

Finally, I had a look at Star Wars Jedi Survivor. I set the game to 1080p with the lowest preset, which is essentially running it at its native resolution without using Nvidia's FSR technology. This was an interesting test, as it showed just how well this card performs in power and driver support terms alone. The average frame rate was a surprisingly good 37 FPS, with a 1% low of around 30s. While the results may not be as strong as some more modern cards, I was pleased to see that the 980 still delivers great performance, even without FSR.

Last but not least, I had a look at The Last of Us Part One. This is another demanding title that really pushes this card to its limits. However, when set to native 1080p with all the settings turned down to their lowest, I was pleased to see that the average frame rate was still a very respectable 43 FPS, with a 1% low stuck in the mid-30s. Overall, I was surprised by how well this card performs in demanding scenarios like this one, and it's clear that the 980 is still a great option for those on a budget.

I hope you've enjoyed this look back at the Nvidia GeForce RTX 980. It's been a pleasure to see just how well this card still holds up today, even after 10 years of being released. Whether you're looking for a budget-friendly GPU or simply want to see how one of these old cards performs in modern games and benchmarks, I hope this review has given you a better idea of what to expect.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone and welcome to another video now back in September of 2014 the GTX 980 here was the fastest single GPU based card you could buy of course that's not really a phrase we hear anymore because the days of dual GPU cards have long disappeared but this thing at 549 US dollars at launch was pretty good for the money this Asus direct cu2oc strix Edition model was actually about 30 dollars more expensive so for one of if not the best GTX 980 that really wasn't much more to pay and for that you got four gigs of gddr5 higher clock speeds and of course lower power consumption than the previous fast discard on the market the 7A TTI which had a TDP of about 250 watts compared so this one's 165. of course this being a Maxwell card that does mean it is still supported and if you were to buy a 700 series card these days you'd find that driver support ended quite a while back making the 900 series possibly the lowest I would recommend going in 2023 that said whether or not it's supported is sort of irrelevant if it doesn't perform well and today we're going to be seeing how well this card holds up in 2023 of course you'd be better off with the 6 gig 980 TI that launched later in 2015 I believe but this one well these are pretty cheap these days around about the same price as a 3 gig 1060 so we should get into some games and see what it can do first up we have Red Dead Redemption 2. now I'm going to be showing you the settings for each of these games because if you want one of these cards well you might want to follow the settings that I've chosen here if you want similar performance of course now with red dead I went with the ultra textures and everything else was pretty much set to medium including TAA I found that this gave us a very nice frame rate pretty much 60 FPS although annoyingly the average did come back at 59. I think this is because in those busier areas you will see a few dips to the high 40s low 50s but these are the settings I definitely stick with in order to play this smoothly I wouldn't buy one of these expecting a solid 60 FPS across the board without some massive sacrifices so it's always nice to try and Target somewhere near that with one of these I think but it does a very nice job of course we could enable FSR but I've decided to leave any upscaling methods turned off today so that you can see exactly how this card does at Native 1080p a resolution that I'd recommend sticking with these days no FSR to be seen here for our next game we have cyberpunk 2077. let's jump into the settings menu once again here I've actually gone with the medium crowd density and the medium textures just to make the game look a little sharper and to make it feel a little more lively a little busier thanks to that Medium crowd density preset now everything else has been set to lowest I don't think there's any point in turning things much up beyond that with this card as it is we're going to see 54 FPS on average which I think is actually really respectable considering that this card well next year it'll be 10 years old so I mean it's nine years old still going fairly strong it can still play most games as you'll see at 1080p resolution so yeah it's it's really not bad at all 54 on average with fairly solid percentile lows here though cyberpunk being as demanding as it is even after plenty of updates well there will be a few dips to the high 30s in those busier areas you may have noticed as well that I've actually paired it with an I3 12 316 gigs of RAM as opposed to my usual i5 and 32 gigs of RAM reason being is that I feel that this is more realistic I don't think you're going to be building an i5 machine or a modern one and pairing a 980 with it but I think the I3 isn't too far-fetched you know if you want to put together a modern 12th gen system and you plan on buying a cheaper card now and upgrading later something like this would still let you get the most out of one of these cards without totally going overboard if you get what I mean for Elden ring I went with the mostly medium settings as you can see here this started off with the medium preset I did turn off a couple of things out of personal preference as I always do including motion blur and depth of field because I don't know about you but I just cannot stand those options in games it is all about personal preference of course now this one surprised me quite a lot I wasn't expecting to hit the 60fps cap here and I certainly wasn't expecting these solid percentile lows I was running around mostly fighting the air as I always tend to do and the frame rate stayed pretty solid no massive dips or drops here at all I should say that if you are using an older processor with this card you may find that the performance differs quite a bit because this does have a few problems with older CPU architectures but with the i312 300 here and the 980 in combination we are getting some really nice figures nice to see this card holding up well in Elden ring 2. Forza Horizon 5 as you know this is very well optimized I simply went with the higher preset here didn't change anything else but I did have TAA enabled as I always do as well for the average we saw 69 FPS very nice with solid 1 and 0.1 lows of 56 and 54 respect effectively those percentile lows are usually quite close together when it comes to Forza Horizon 5 because it does run very well on a wide variety of systems always nice to see this one in action and nice again to see the 980 holding up very well GTA 5 is a lot older but I do like to include it because once you turn things up a bit it can become quite demanding now here I've gone with mostly highest settings but I did have the advanced Graphics turned off because I don't feel that they add a whole lot to the game graphically whereas they will sort of destroy the frame rate especially with a card like this so instead of that I just turned on msaa set this to 2X and then we were ready to get into the game now on average atfps was a nice result with a one percent low of 64 and a 0.1 low of 56 so nothing to worry about with this old title a title that actually came out on PC not long after the card came to Market so I feel that this should give you some sort of context as to what one of these cards was capable of because we're using a game of similar age going into Hogwarts Legacy I did think I was pushing it with the medium preset I thought this was going to be quite disastrous but I stuck with it kept TAA set to low as opposed to high and once I jumped into the game well I was surprised to see an average of over 50 FPS now if we turn things down to low which I did try it we still won't average 60 but we do come pretty close so I thought we may as well stick with medium here and uh hit that sort of somewhere between 50 and 60 FPS number you can of course enable eversar perhaps into xcss but as I said at the start I wanted to keep that off to give you a good idea of what this card can do natively but perhaps we'll go back and um check out individual games and see what they can do with certain settings with a card like this that's something I've been meaning to do a lot more of but as it is native with medium this was actually a really nice result for the 980 couldn't quite believe that we saw this sort of figure but I think the games had some performance patches recently that have really helped Marvel Spider-Man remastered again I went with the medium preset and TAA expecting to hit somewhere between 40 and 50 FPS but lo and behold we actually averaged 62. now depending on where you are and what you're doing let's say you're in crowded areas or areas with a lot more traffic going on you may see a few little dips and drops here and there perhaps low 40s in terms of frame rate but as you can see by the percentile lows of 47 and 41 respectively for the most part things held up pretty solidly if that's even a word so another nice result here for the 980 which I actually purchased for just 65 pounds considering this is one of the top or the the Top Model um I think that's a really good price as I said you're looking at sort of 1063 gig money and I do think these still offer slightly better performance as well they are still supported too which is nice to see unlike the older 700 series flagships next up we have a game that I've thrown back into the Benchmark roster which is Mafia Definitive Edition because I absolutely love this game it's a remake of the original title which I also really do enjoy playing even to this day high settings across the board here with a few personal preferences turned off 64 FPS on average 57 was the one percent low and a 0.1 low of 49 meant that everything was very smooth there were a couple of hitches when we first loaded up the game but as I recall this tends to happen around the sort of safe house and garage area you fire up the game there's a bit of a dip and a drop but once you've driven out of the safe area things do smooth out and that was the case here Resident Evil 4 up next this is of course the demo don't know why I still haven't purchased the full game um maybe I will do eventually 1080p with the prioritized performance preset there were a couple of changes that I made here chromatic aberration was turned off and so was motion blur again due to personal preference we actually averaged 75 FPS 1080p this is very much a 1080p card in 2023 the one percent low was 60. I did see a couple of major stutters like sort of microstaters if you will all of a sudden I think going from one area to the other there was like a slight drop that lasted no more than a couple of milliseconds and that's responsible for that point one percent low so it may not be the case when you're playing it that might not happen but in my experience it did so I can only be honest and say what I saw next up we had Star Wars Jedi Survivor 1080p with the lowest preset um I actually think that as of an update today or the day this video was uploaded there has been a patch that's addressed the FSR issue now before you couldn't set the FSR to disabled without turning everything up to Epic and then dropping all the settings um one by one it just wouldn't happen but now it seems that you can actually disable FSR and the game will disable it without dropping the native resolution to like 50 or whatever it was doing before so nice to see that after I complained about it yesterday it has been fixed I don't think I had anything to do with that but a nice coincidence I think you'll agree 37 FPS on average we could benefit from FSR but as I said we've left it off today to see what this card can do on pure power and driver support alone 37 really wasn't that bad considering how demanding this game is the 0.1 lows were also okay a few tips and drops here and there but this is possibly the newest game on today's Benchmark list finally we have another demanding title The Last of Us Part One this is also played at the lowest settings but it is played at Native 1080p as you can see here everything is turned down to its respective lowest and we are using 100 scaling as well so no FSR no lower render resolution anything like that pure 1080p gaming here jumping into the gameplay 43 was a pretty surprising average and the one percent low stuck to the mid 30s as well so I think overall yeah I mean this was another surprising result considering the 980 is 10 years old next year I think it still does a very good job for the money it's it cost me like 65 pounds this has been a look back at the 980. I hope you've enjoyed it it's really surprised me today I hope it surprised you too but leave your thoughts Down Below in the comments because I always love to read them if you enjoyed this one leave a like leave a dislike if you didn't subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already and hopefully I'll see all of you in the next onehello everyone and welcome to another video now back in September of 2014 the GTX 980 here was the fastest single GPU based card you could buy of course that's not really a phrase we hear anymore because the days of dual GPU cards have long disappeared but this thing at 549 US dollars at launch was pretty good for the money this Asus direct cu2oc strix Edition model was actually about 30 dollars more expensive so for one of if not the best GTX 980 that really wasn't much more to pay and for that you got four gigs of gddr5 higher clock speeds and of course lower power consumption than the previous fast discard on the market the 7A TTI which had a TDP of about 250 watts compared so this one's 165. of course this being a Maxwell card that does mean it is still supported and if you were to buy a 700 series card these days you'd find that driver support ended quite a while back making the 900 series possibly the lowest I would recommend going in 2023 that said whether or not it's supported is sort of irrelevant if it doesn't perform well and today we're going to be seeing how well this card holds up in 2023 of course you'd be better off with the 6 gig 980 TI that launched later in 2015 I believe but this one well these are pretty cheap these days around about the same price as a 3 gig 1060 so we should get into some games and see what it can do first up we have Red Dead Redemption 2. now I'm going to be showing you the settings for each of these games because if you want one of these cards well you might want to follow the settings that I've chosen here if you want similar performance of course now with red dead I went with the ultra textures and everything else was pretty much set to medium including TAA I found that this gave us a very nice frame rate pretty much 60 FPS although annoyingly the average did come back at 59. I think this is because in those busier areas you will see a few dips to the high 40s low 50s but these are the settings I definitely stick with in order to play this smoothly I wouldn't buy one of these expecting a solid 60 FPS across the board without some massive sacrifices so it's always nice to try and Target somewhere near that with one of these I think but it does a very nice job of course we could enable FSR but I've decided to leave any upscaling methods turned off today so that you can see exactly how this card does at Native 1080p a resolution that I'd recommend sticking with these days no FSR to be seen here for our next game we have cyberpunk 2077. let's jump into the settings menu once again here I've actually gone with the medium crowd density and the medium textures just to make the game look a little sharper and to make it feel a little more lively a little busier thanks to that Medium crowd density preset now everything else has been set to lowest I don't think there's any point in turning things much up beyond that with this card as it is we're going to see 54 FPS on average which I think is actually really respectable considering that this card well next year it'll be 10 years old so I mean it's nine years old still going fairly strong it can still play most games as you'll see at 1080p resolution so yeah it's it's really not bad at all 54 on average with fairly solid percentile lows here though cyberpunk being as demanding as it is even after plenty of updates well there will be a few dips to the high 30s in those busier areas you may have noticed as well that I've actually paired it with an I3 12 316 gigs of RAM as opposed to my usual i5 and 32 gigs of RAM reason being is that I feel that this is more realistic I don't think you're going to be building an i5 machine or a modern one and pairing a 980 with it but I think the I3 isn't too far-fetched you know if you want to put together a modern 12th gen system and you plan on buying a cheaper card now and upgrading later something like this would still let you get the most out of one of these cards without totally going overboard if you get what I mean for Elden ring I went with the mostly medium settings as you can see here this started off with the medium preset I did turn off a couple of things out of personal preference as I always do including motion blur and depth of field because I don't know about you but I just cannot stand those options in games it is all about personal preference of course now this one surprised me quite a lot I wasn't expecting to hit the 60fps cap here and I certainly wasn't expecting these solid percentile lows I was running around mostly fighting the air as I always tend to do and the frame rate stayed pretty solid no massive dips or drops here at all I should say that if you are using an older processor with this card you may find that the performance differs quite a bit because this does have a few problems with older CPU architectures but with the i312 300 here and the 980 in combination we are getting some really nice figures nice to see this card holding up well in Elden ring 2. Forza Horizon 5 as you know this is very well optimized I simply went with the higher preset here didn't change anything else but I did have TAA enabled as I always do as well for the average we saw 69 FPS very nice with solid 1 and 0.1 lows of 56 and 54 respect effectively those percentile lows are usually quite close together when it comes to Forza Horizon 5 because it does run very well on a wide variety of systems always nice to see this one in action and nice again to see the 980 holding up very well GTA 5 is a lot older but I do like to include it because once you turn things up a bit it can become quite demanding now here I've gone with mostly highest settings but I did have the advanced Graphics turned off because I don't feel that they add a whole lot to the game graphically whereas they will sort of destroy the frame rate especially with a card like this so instead of that I just turned on msaa set this to 2X and then we were ready to get into the game now on average atfps was a nice result with a one percent low of 64 and a 0.1 low of 56 so nothing to worry about with this old title a title that actually came out on PC not long after the card came to Market so I feel that this should give you some sort of context as to what one of these cards was capable of because we're using a game of similar age going into Hogwarts Legacy I did think I was pushing it with the medium preset I thought this was going to be quite disastrous but I stuck with it kept TAA set to low as opposed to high and once I jumped into the game well I was surprised to see an average of over 50 FPS now if we turn things down to low which I did try it we still won't average 60 but we do come pretty close so I thought we may as well stick with medium here and uh hit that sort of somewhere between 50 and 60 FPS number you can of course enable eversar perhaps into xcss but as I said at the start I wanted to keep that off to give you a good idea of what this card can do natively but perhaps we'll go back and um check out individual games and see what they can do with certain settings with a card like this that's something I've been meaning to do a lot more of but as it is native with medium this was actually a really nice result for the 980 couldn't quite believe that we saw this sort of figure but I think the games had some performance patches recently that have really helped Marvel Spider-Man remastered again I went with the medium preset and TAA expecting to hit somewhere between 40 and 50 FPS but lo and behold we actually averaged 62. now depending on where you are and what you're doing let's say you're in crowded areas or areas with a lot more traffic going on you may see a few little dips and drops here and there perhaps low 40s in terms of frame rate but as you can see by the percentile lows of 47 and 41 respectively for the most part things held up pretty solidly if that's even a word so another nice result here for the 980 which I actually purchased for just 65 pounds considering this is one of the top or the the Top Model um I think that's a really good price as I said you're looking at sort of 1063 gig money and I do think these still offer slightly better performance as well they are still supported too which is nice to see unlike the older 700 series flagships next up we have a game that I've thrown back into the Benchmark roster which is Mafia Definitive Edition because I absolutely love this game it's a remake of the original title which I also really do enjoy playing even to this day high settings across the board here with a few personal preferences turned off 64 FPS on average 57 was the one percent low and a 0.1 low of 49 meant that everything was very smooth there were a couple of hitches when we first loaded up the game but as I recall this tends to happen around the sort of safe house and garage area you fire up the game there's a bit of a dip and a drop but once you've driven out of the safe area things do smooth out and that was the case here Resident Evil 4 up next this is of course the demo don't know why I still haven't purchased the full game um maybe I will do eventually 1080p with the prioritized performance preset there were a couple of changes that I made here chromatic aberration was turned off and so was motion blur again due to personal preference we actually averaged 75 FPS 1080p this is very much a 1080p card in 2023 the one percent low was 60. I did see a couple of major stutters like sort of microstaters if you will all of a sudden I think going from one area to the other there was like a slight drop that lasted no more than a couple of milliseconds and that's responsible for that point one percent low so it may not be the case when you're playing it that might not happen but in my experience it did so I can only be honest and say what I saw next up we had Star Wars Jedi Survivor 1080p with the lowest preset um I actually think that as of an update today or the day this video was uploaded there has been a patch that's addressed the FSR issue now before you couldn't set the FSR to disabled without turning everything up to Epic and then dropping all the settings um one by one it just wouldn't happen but now it seems that you can actually disable FSR and the game will disable it without dropping the native resolution to like 50 or whatever it was doing before so nice to see that after I complained about it yesterday it has been fixed I don't think I had anything to do with that but a nice coincidence I think you'll agree 37 FPS on average we could benefit from FSR but as I said we've left it off today to see what this card can do on pure power and driver support alone 37 really wasn't that bad considering how demanding this game is the 0.1 lows were also okay a few tips and drops here and there but this is possibly the newest game on today's Benchmark list finally we have another demanding title The Last of Us Part One this is also played at the lowest settings but it is played at Native 1080p as you can see here everything is turned down to its respective lowest and we are using 100 scaling as well so no FSR no lower render resolution anything like that pure 1080p gaming here jumping into the gameplay 43 was a pretty surprising average and the one percent low stuck to the mid 30s as well so I think overall yeah I mean this was another surprising result considering the 980 is 10 years old next year I think it still does a very good job for the money it's it cost me like 65 pounds this has been a look back at the 980. I hope you've enjoyed it it's really surprised me today I hope it surprised you too but leave your thoughts Down Below in the comments because I always love to read them if you enjoyed this one leave a like leave a dislike if you didn't subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already and hopefully I'll see all of you in the next one\n"