Benchmarks: 1080p Extreme Quality Results

The testing here is mostly the same as the previous page with the exception of the preset which has been reduced from 'Crazy' to 'Extreme'. This preset changes just a single setting: it reduces the 'Terrain Shading Samples' setting from 'high' to 'mid' and this seems to have quite an impact on performance.

Reducing the terrain shading samples doesn't appear to help Nvidia hunt down the AMD cards as the R9 390 furthers itself from the GTX 970, it is now 33% faster.

The margin between the R9 390X and GTX 980 remains much the same. This time we see poor mixed card performance when pairing the GTX 980 with the R9 390X – this combo averaged just 67fps. However, swapping the cards around boosted performance by 22% making the R9 390X/GTX 980 combo 39% faster than a single R9 390X. Still in comparison dual 390X cards averaged 92fps, making them 58% faster than a single card.

The GTX 980 Ti was able to reduce the margin between it and the R9 Fury using the extreme quality settings, the GeForce based graphics card was just 12% slower in the normal test and 10% slower in the heavy test.

It's interesting to note that although the 980 Ti/390X combo was just 31% faster than a single GTX 980 Ti for the normal test, it was almost 60% faster in the heavy test.