Conclusion

First of all we have a quick chat about prices. These days a reference GTX 780 costs 380 Euro. Compare that to the 515 Euro you'd have to pay for the cheapest reference GTX 980 you can find and you’ll notice the GTX 980 is about 36 percent more expensive.

To dive a bit deeper into the results, we start with performance differences in 3DMark graphics score where we see that the GTX 980 is 30 percent quicker in FireStrike Performance and Extreme than the GTX 780, and 163 percent faster when running FireStrike Ultra. In the next theoretical test we ran, Unigine Heaven, we see that the GTX 980 is on average 20 percent quicker in 1080p, 13 percent when running 1440p and 27 percent using our 2160p preset. In the case of games it turns out that performance differences highly depend on the resolution combined with level of detail. In other words we see that the GTX 780’s memory is the bottlenecking factor, since 3 Gigabyte are simply not enough for UHD with high levels of detail. When running 1080p resolution, the GTX 980 is faster in all 13 games tested. One game that shows significant difference is Sniper Elite 3, where the GTX 980 is about 48 percent faster than the GTX 780 in 1080p, 1440p shows 51 percent and checking 2160p we find over 100 percent difference. Having a closer look at Far Cry 4 at 1080p the GTX 980 scored 57 percent, 1440p shows the GTX 980 is about 44 percent ahead and there is nice 79 percent difference in 2160. A closer look at GRID Autosport reveals a 36 percent gap in 1080p, 54 percent in 1440p and 63 percent in 2160p. Apart from that it’s the same story for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, where the difference is about 35 percent on average with 1080p and 1440p but close to 70 percent difference in UHD. Last but no least we also had a look at power consumption and we noticed that the test system with GTX 780 burns 15 percent more power. Under load the difference shoots up to a whopping 37 percent.

The difference between GTX 780 and GTX 980 is rather big. In 1080p as well as 1440p the new card is a good 30% faster and in UHD performance is a whopping 50 percent higher. Especially if you're planning on playing at UHD resolution, we would recommend to replace the old GTX 780 with a new GTX 980. The fact that there are 4 Gigabyte of memory, compared to the 3 Gigabyte you've got with the GTX 780, also helps a lot with gaming at ultra high resolutions. Compared to the system with a GTX 780, the GTX 980 will make games playable at UltraHD. Apparently you're not always able to run everything with max settings but usually reducing anti aliasing helps a lot already.

Page 1 - Test Setup	Page 11 - Thief
Page 2 - 3DMark Fire Strike	Page 12 - GRID Autosport
Page 3 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 13 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 4 - Borderlands - The Pre-Sequel	Page 14 - Metro Last Light
Page 5 - BattleField 4	Page 15 - Assassin's Creed Unity
Page 6 - Watch Dogs	Page 16 - Far Cry 4
Page 7 - Tomb Raider	Page 17 - Power Consumption
Page 8 - Sniper Elite 3	Page 6 - Prices
Page 9 - Crysis 3	Page 19 - Performance Index
Page 10 - Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare	Page 20 - Conclusion