I’ll continue using the MSI GT72 laptop and do longer-term testing of the GTX 980 look for a full review of the laptop coming in the next few weeks.Metro: Last Light - ?‚?µ?» ?ˆ?°?»?ˆ?‹ ?µ?‚?ˆ? 2033. Testing at 1600p, I’d peg the 980M’s performance at approximately 65% of its desktop counterpart.
GTX 980 METRO LAST LIGHT BENCHMARK 1080P
Unless you have to play every game on the highest possible settings (and if you do, why game on a laptop?) the 980M will be a great card for 1080p gaming. The numbers above don’t make a convincing claim for using Nvidia’s Dynamic Super Resolution downsampling on the 980M the mobile graphics card is clearly best-suited to running games at 1080p.
Hitman Absolution did actually live up to Nvidia’s claim and nailed 75% performance. The performance discrepancy naturally varied between benchmarks, but all but Hitman Absolution fell below that 75% claim in my testing.
At 1080p, lowering AA settings or turning down some post-processing could easily keep most games running at more than 60 frames per second, which makes this a hell of a mobile GPU.īut is the 980M actually 75% as fast as the GTX 980? If you do the math on the numbers above, the answer is no. It is impressive that the mobile 980M is able to push out enough pixels to run most of these games at ultra settings, 2560x1600, while keeping above 30 frames per second. There it didn’t fare quite as well as Nvidia claimed. Because we did most of our desktop GTX 980 benchmarks at 2560x1600, I hooked the MSI GT72 up to a 30-inch monitor to test its performance against the full-size reference card, paired with a Haswell i7-3960X and 16GB DDR3. Powered benchmarks are the true test.Īt 1080p, the GTX 980M turned in great framerates plugged in, often getting above 60 frames per second. On-battery results don’t come anywhere close to the desktop 980’s performance, but that’s to be expected. Though portability is the big selling point of a gaming laptop, typically, any serious gaming time spent with them will be spent plugged into an outlet. It will take more testing to see how the MSI GT72’s battery life fares with battery boost enabled and disabled. Disabling battery boost delivered slightly higher framerates in most games, but not enough to make a significant difference. If you can stomach gaming at 30 fps, though, Battery Boost will be able to keep games running smoothly. These are obviously strenuous tests, and turning off a few settings, even playing at high with a few bells and whistles turned off, will deliver much more playable framerates. The GPU just can’t get enough juice off the battery alone to run at full capacity. Playable, but often not great-realistically, most demanding games won’t be able to maintain a solid 60 fps at these settings unplugged. In Tomb Raider, TressFX was enabled in Metro: Last Light, tessellation was set to high.Īs you can see, each benchmark delivered playable framerates at 1080p and ultra settings, even unplugged. Here are the average frames per second results of each benchmark at 1080p and ultra settings, typically with 4x MSAA and an ultra preset.