Nvidia'south graphics lineup could be deemed complete in the enthusiast front. Starting at $200 with the GeForce GTX 960 and finishing at $1,000 with the 3072 CUDA cadre monster that is the GTX Titan X. Hardcore gamers with greenbacks to spare volition arguably say the end line isn't crossed until yous hit ii or even three Titan Xs, just I digress.

The GeForce 900 series based on the Maxwell GPU architecture is completed by the original GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 that arrived eight months ago. Notwithstanding Nvidia appears to be set for a repeat with a Ti edition GPU that bridges the distance betwixt its erstwhile GTX 980 flagship and the latest Titan.

The GTX Titan X is withal a new endeavor, arriving to market place in belatedly March, information technology raised the bar for single GPU performance -- or rather took the bar and placed information technology so loftier that it most warranted the Titan X's otherwise exorbitant asking price. In fact, had Nvidia not nerfed double precision compute performance, the Titan X would have been a serious deal at $i,000.

Regardless of pricing, there'southward a reason for the Titan 10 to exist: they sell like hotcakes. Even though we found the Titan Ten to exist ~37% faster than the GTX 980 while costing fourscore% more than, that hasn't stopped sales to exceed supply.

The new GeForce GTX 980 Ti is still targeting 4K gaming and with 6GB of retentivity onboard it's still overkill but without backlog. Whereas the Titan X featured a fully-fledged GM200 chip with 24 streaming multiprocessors and 3072 CUDA cores, the new GeForce GTX 980 Ti has been slightly downgraded to 22 SM units and 2816 cores. The massive 12GB retentiveness buffer establish on the Titan 10 has been slashed in half resulting in an ample 6GB buffer, 2GB more than than the original GTX 980.

Nvidia is banking on three new developments to further button sales of high-end GPUs:

Afterward this year Microsoft will release DirectX 12 which volition reduce CPU overhead and enable new graphics features. For example, volume tiled resources will allow developers to render burn down and smoke with richer item than ever before. According to Microsoft there are at least a hundred game developers already working on DX12 titles.

High resolution gaming, i.east. 4K gaming, is besides creating need for more than powerful GPUs. This accounts for much of the Titan X'southward success as the first graphics carte du jour that can evangelize playable 4K performance on a single GPU. Cheers to falling prices the adoption of 4K displays is really taking off. In the last 12 months, the 4K market segment has doubled in growth.

Virtual reality is as well expected to bulldoze PC gaming in the coming years. Nvidia seems to take a leg upward equally all leading VR makers take demonstrated their products on GeForce GPUs.

GeForce GTX 980 Ti

We expect the GTX 980 Ti to be another processing powerhorse. As noted earlier, the GTX 980 Ti features a core configuration that consists of 2816 SPUs which take intendance of pixel/vertex/geometry shading duties, while texture filtering is performed by 176 texture units. With a base clock frequency of 1000MHz, texture filtering rate is 176 Gigatexels/sec, which is over 20% college than the GTX 980. The GTX 980 Ti also ships with 3MB of L2 cache and 96 ROPs.

The retentiveness subsystem consists of six 64-bit memory controllers (384-bit) with 6GB of GDDR5 memory. This means that the 384-bit wide memory interface and 7GHz memory clock deliver a peak retentivity bandwidth that is l% college than GTX 980 at 336.5GB/sec, the same as the Titan X.

The large 6GB memory buffer should allow gamers to play DX12 games on the GTX 980 Ti at 4K resolutions without worrying well-nigh running short on graphics retention.

Whereas the Titan X is built using the full implementation of the GM200 chip, the GTX 980 Ti has been cut down slightly, all the same the display/video engines are unchanged from the GM204 GPU used in the GTX 980. Also like the GTX 980, overall double-precision is one/32 the rate of single-precision instruction throughput.

The base clock speed of the GTX 980 Ti is 1000MHz, with Heave Clock speed of 1075MHz, it matches the Titan X. The Heave Clock speed is based on the boilerplate GTX 980 Ti card running a wide variety of games and applications.

Setting operation bated for a moment, one of the GTX 980 Ti's other noteworthy features is its stunning board design. The blueprint is virtually identical to that of the Titan X as the aforementioned aluminum cover has been used. The metallic casing gives the board a premium look and feel.

A copper vapor chamber is used to cool the GTX 980 Ti'due south GM200 GPU. This vapor sleeping accommodation is combined with a big, dual-slot aluminum heatsink to dissipate heat off the scrap. A blower style fan then exhausts this hot air through the back of the graphics bill of fare and outside the PC's chassis. The fan is designed to run very quietly, even while under load when the card is overclocked.

If you lot recall, the GTX 980 reference board design included a backplate on the underside of the carte with a section that could be removed to better airflow when multiple GTX 980 cards are placed side by side to each other (as with 3- and 4-mode SLI, for example). To provide maximum airflow to the GTX 980 Ti's cooler in these situations, Nvidia does not include a backplate on the reference card.

The GTX 980 Ti reference lath measures 10.5" long. Display outputs include one dual-link DVI output, ane HDMI 2.0 output and iii DisplayPort connectors. One 8-pin PCIe ability connector and ane 6-pin PCIe power connector are required for performance.

Speaking of ability connectors, the GTX 980 Ti has a TDP rating of 250 watts (aforementioned as Titan 10) and Nvidia calls for a 600w power supply for running a unmarried carte du jour. That is a little over fifty% college than the TDP rating of the GTX 980, though it is still xiv% lower than the Radeon R9 290X.

Nvidia says that being an enthusiast'south graphics menu, the GTX 980 Ti has been designed for overclocking and implements a 6-stage power supply with overvoltage capability. An boosted two-stage power supply is dedicated for the board's GDDR5 retentiveness. This 6+2 phase design supplies GTX 980 Ti with more than enough ability, even when the lath is overclocked. The GTX 980 Ti reference lath design supplies the GPU with 275 watts of power at the maximum power target setting of 110%.

Nvidia has used polarized capacitors (POSCAPS) to minimize unwanted lath noise also every bit molded inductors. To further improve the card's overclocking potential, Nvidia has improved airflow to these board components so they run libation compared to previous high-end GK110 products, including the original GTX Titan.

Moreover, Nvidia told united states they were able to push the GTX 980 Ti up to 1.4GHz using nothing more than the supplied air-cooler during its testing, so we're patently interested in checking that out.

Test System Specs

All GPU configurations have been tested at 2560x1600 and 3840x2160 UHD 4K resolutions. Graphics cards were tested with core and memory clock speeds fix to AMD and Nvidia's specifications.

  • Intel Cadre i7-5960X (3.0GHz)
  • x4 4GB Kingston Predator DDR4-2400 (CAS 12-13-13-24)
  • Asrock X99 Extreme6 (Intel X99)
  • Silverstone Strider Serial (700w)
  • Crucial MX200 1TB (SATA 6Gb/s)
  • Nvidia GeForce Titan X (12288MB)
  • Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti (6144MB)
  • Gainward GeForce GTX 980 (4096MB)
  • Gainward GeForce GTX 970 (4096MB)
  • Palit GeForce GTX 780 Ti (3072MB)
  • Palit GeForce GTX 780 (3072MB)
  • AMD Radeon R9 295X2 (2x 4096MB)
  • Gigabyte Radeon R9 290X (4096MB)
  • Gigabyte Radeon R9 290 (4096MB)
  • HIS Radeon R9 280X (3072MB)
  • Microsoft Windows 8.one Pro 64-bit
  • Nvidia GeForce 352.xc
  • AMD Catalyst 15.five Beta

Benchmarks: Crysis 3, BioShock, Metro Redux

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti averaged 50fps at 1600p making information technology 40% faster than the Radeon R9 290X and 27% faster than the GTX 980. Information technology also managed to trail the Titan X past just 2-3 fps. Upping the resolution to 2160p the GTX 980 Ti delivered just 28fps and while the performance margins between the Titan Ten and GTX 980 remained the same, the GTX 980 Ti was now 47% faster than the R9 290X.

BioShock Space is hands playable at 4k equally the GeForce GTX 980 Ti averaged 51fps, making it merely 7% slower than the Titan X, but 28% faster than the GTX 980. The 980 Ti was also 42% faster than the Radeon R9 290X which averaged 36fps at this resolution.

Metro Redux was very playable at 1600p with the GeForce GTX 980 Ti rendering 58fps on average (six% slower than the Titan 10). Jumping to 2160p reduced the average frame rate to almost one-half, this extended the GTX 980 Ti's lead over the GTX 980, while reducing its atomic number 82 over the R9 290X.