Heaven & Valley

Another benchmark that needs no introduction, both Heaven and Valley are known for the beautiful “journeys” that they take you on. Of the two, Valley is the more recent benchmark, however neither have a preset that allows it to run at 4K and we had to set the resolution manually.

Unigine Valley

First we set it to the highest default settings, Extreme HD, which runs at 1920×1080. Unlike with the Fire Strike series, the GTX 780 HOF has managed to beat out the GTX 970 SSC here.

See usage/FPS report below

Next we turned the resolution up to 3840×2160 and left all other settings the same. Here we see that although the GTX 780 HOF is still ahead, the gap is closing, this could be due to perhaps the extra 1GB of memory on the GTX 970.

The Usage/FPS report is where things get interesting though. As you can see in the previous report, CPU usage is much much higher compared to the one for the 4K run. We want to emphasize that no other settings besides resolution were changed here.

1080p has been the go-to resolution for so long that massive CPU throttling was a common concern. With resolutions increasing at such an intense pace we don’t think CPU bottlenecks are going to be the major problem anymore until GPUs catch up.

To give it some perspective, 1080p launched in 2005 on select TVs and monitors and is still the most common resolution used today, ten years later! The first mainstream 4K/UHD monitors launched during the summer of 2013 for over $3,000 USD. The first 5K monitor launched December 2014, around a year and a half after 4K. Although 5K may not seem like a big jump over 4K, with over 14 million pixels it towers over the 4K’s 8 million pixels. It doesn’t stop there either, 8K TVs with a monster resolution of 7680 x 4320 have already been shown by some manufacturers. The resolution wars are upon us and considering how fast Nvidia is continuously putting out new technologies compared to the CPU manufacturers, that’s probably a good thing.

Unigine Heaven

First up we ran Heaven at the highest preset available, Extreme.

Usage/FPS Report

Next we turned the resolution up to 3840×2160 and kept all the other settings the same.

As with Valley, CPU usage significantly drops when the resolution was upped.

Read on for Folding@Home Benchmarks!