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GTX980-Ti

Nvidia has launched its next loftier-stop GPU, and it's a stunner. Just equally the GTX 780 followed the original Titan, the GTX 980 Ti will slide in between the Titan X and the upper-cease "standard" consumer menu, the GTX 980. This new card is based on the same GM200 GPU every bit the Titan X, just trims the VRAM buffer down to 6GB, from Titan Ten's 12GB. The cooler design is outwardly identical to the shroud and fan that Nvidia has deployed since it kickoff unveiled the GTX Titan.

GF-Cooler

Overall, the GTX 980 Ti is a very pocket-sized step down from what the Titan X offers. It has 22 SM clusters equally opposed to Titan X's 24, for a total of 2816 GPU cores (a roughly 9% reduction). Trim the texture units by the same ratio (176 as opposed to 192) and keep the full number of ROPS the aforementioned (96). So cut the RAM in half, for a full of 6GB, down from 12GB, and voila — you have the GTX 980 Ti.

GTX980-TiSpecs

The memory clock, base clock, and boost clock on the 980 Ti are all identical to Titan Ten, as is its pixel fill charge per unit. Texture rate is downwards slightly, thanks to the decreased number of texture mapping units. Both fries have a 384-chip memory bus. Nvidia has promised that the 980 Ti has total admission to its memory puddle, and that overall GPU memory bandwidth should be in-line with Titan 10. We come across no evidence of any retentivity-related bug, and the 6GB retention buffer on the carte give the chip room to breathe in whatever example.

On paper, the GTX 980 Ti packs virtually all of the Titan 10'southward punch into a much lower $649 toll.

Competitive positioning

If you follow the GPU market with whatsoever regularity, you're likely already aware that AMD has a new, High Bandwidth Memory-equipped graphics card launching in the virtually future, possibly dubbed the Radeon Fury. As things stand up today, all the same, AMD just has 1 GPU that seriously plays in the $500+ space — the R9 295X2. At $619, it'due south down essentially from its $1500 launch toll — cheap enough to be considered strong contest for Nvidia'due south GTX 980 Ti and Titan X cards.

R9-295X2

Dual-vs-single GPU comparisons are intrinsically tricky. The doubled-upward card is about always the overall winner — it'due south uncommonly rare for AMD or Nvidia to take such an advantage over the other that ii cards can't outpace one. The reason dual GPUs don't automatically sweep such comparisons is twofold: First, not all games support more than one graphics carte du jour, which leaves the second GPU effectively sitting idle. Second, even when a game does back up multiple cards, it typically takes driver optimizations to fully enable it.

The R9 295X2, Titan X, GTX 980, and GTX 980 Ti were all tested in a Haswell-Eastward organisation with an Asus X99-Deluxe motherboard, 16GB of DDR4-2667, and Windows 8.1 64-bit with all patches and updates installed. The latest AMD Catalyst Omega drivers and Nvidia GeForce 352.90 drivers were used. Our power consumption figures are going to exist somewhat higher in this review than in some previous stories — the 1200W PSU we used for testing was a standard 80 Plus unit, and not the 1275 80 Plus Platinum that we've typically tested with.

V-Sync was disabled in all tests, as was Yard-Sync.

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