Benchmarks: Gaming
The GeForce GTX 980M is a known quantity and has serviced performance laptops for well over a year. EVGA's SC17 slots into the pack as expected and needs the overclock to break the 9,000-point barrier in 3DMark Fire Strike.
How does the GTX 980M fare with regards to modern games? We've run a quartet of recent titles at a full-HD 1080p resolution with the aim of achieving an average of 70 frames per second or more.
In order to meet that criteria, The Division and Hitman needed to have quality settings turned-down to medium, Rise of the Tomb Raider had to be reduced from ultra to high, and only Dirt Rally was able to run with everything set to maximum.
For reasons unknown the Sharp display didn't want to scale to 2,560x1,440. We've instead run the games again at 2,560x1,600 and, while the laptop doesn't manage a desired 60fps, all four titles are still playable.
But a single GTX 980M can only do so much. This may be a 4K gaming laptop, but it lacks the gusto required to actually game at 4K. Quality settings would need to be reduced dramatically in order to keep things smooth, and that's not really what you want to be doing on a £2,400 machine. The ultra-high-res panel is still worth having for productivity reasons alone, but it needs a next-gen GPU (or two) to push those in-game pixels.
