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Nvidia has launched its next high-end GPU, and it’s a stunner. Just as the GTX 780 followed the original Titan, the
GTX 980 Ti
will slide in between the
Titan X
and the upper-end “standard” consumer card, the
GTX 980
. This new card is based on the same GM200 GPU as the Titan X, but trims the VRAM buffer down to 6GB, from Titan X’s 12GB. The cooler design is outwardly identical to the shroud and fan that Nvidia has deployed since it first unveiled the GTX Titan.
Overall, the GTX 980 Ti is a very modest step down from what the Titan X offers. It has 22 SM clusters as 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 total number of ROPS the same (96). Then cut the RAM in half, for a total of 6GB, down from 12GB, and voila — you have the GTX 980 Ti.
The memory clock, base clock, and boost clock on the 980 Ti are all identical to Titan X, as is its pixel fill rate. Texture rate is down slightly, thanks to the decreased number of texture mapping units. Both chips have a 384-bit memory bus.
Nvidia
has promised that the 980 Ti has full access to its memory pool, and that overall GPU memory bandwidth should be in-line with Titan X. We see no evidence of any memory-related issues, and the 6GB memory buffer on the card give the chip room to breathe in any case.
On paper, the GTX 980 Ti packs virtually all of the Titan X’s punch into a much lower $649 price.
Competitive positioning
If you follow the GPU market with any regularity, you’re likely already aware that AMD has a new,
High Bandwidth Memory-equipped graphics card
launching in the near future, possibly dubbed the
Radeon Fury
. As things stand today, however,
AMD
only has one GPU that seriously plays in the $500+ space — the R9 295X2. At $619, it’s down substantially from its $1500 launch price — cheap enough to be considered potent competition for Nvidia’s GTX 980 Ti and Titan X cards.
Dual-vs-single GPU comparisons are intrinsically tricky. The doubled-up card is almost always the overall winner — it’s exceptionally rare for AMD or Nvidia to have such an advantage over the other that two 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 card, which leaves the second GPU effectively sitting idle. Second, even when a game does support 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-E system 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 be 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 G-Sync.
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