Update: NVIDIA has officially launched the GeForce GTX 980 Ti graphics card. The graphics card is everything as reported in this article and you can watch the first video commercial of the product below:
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti arrives in the market tomorrow and we can now officially confirm a few things regarding price, performance and design. The GeForce GTX 980 Ti which is based on the flagship GM200 GPU core architecture will be introduced to the market at a sweet price point of $649 US which is expected as the card is going to compete against the flagship AMD Fiji based Radeon graphics card next month and will do so with a higher VRAM and superb custom designs which we had already seen in previous reports.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 TI Leads The Way With Full DirectX 12 Support - $649 US Price and Titan X Like Performance
Just a few minutes ago, the first benchmarks of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti were published in a leaked review by Chinese hardware website Zol.com which have since been pulled by the website but users elsewhere were able to grab screenshots of the card in time. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti may seem like another ultra enthusiast offering from NVIDIA but no one had anticipated such a low price for such a beast of a card. The $649 US versus the $999 US price of the GeForce GTX Titan X not only looks well from a gamer's perspective but even those on the competition side will be looking at the card to see what it has to offer in terms of performance. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti does offer a lot of performance with the card performing on par with the Titan X, most of the times even faster with a small overclock and we can see that in the benchmarks.
The specifications are simple, you take two SMMs and halve of the VRAM out of the Titan and the remaining is what the GeForce GTx 980 Ti would formulate from. The complete GM200 chip has 24 SMMs arranged in 6 GPC (Graphics Processing Clusters). The GeForce GTX 980 Ti features the GM200-310 SKU that has two SMMs cut or simply disabled compared to the GM200-400-A1 on the Titan X. This keeps the core configuration to 2816 cuda cores, 176 texture mapping units and 96 raster operation units. While it is rumored that the memory lane and ROPs might be affected by the disabled SMMs, just like the GTX 970, NVIDIA has better management built for their high-performance core offerings and we won't see the same situation on the GTX 980 Ti. The card feature a 6 GB GDDR5 VRAM that operates along a 384-bit bus interface.
Clock speeds for the GeForce GTX 980 Ti are quite impressive which stay at the same levels of the Titan X. The base clock is set at 1000 MHz while the boost clock is set at 1076 MHz which is just 14 MHz slower than the X. The memory clock is maintained at 7 GHz for the reference cards. The card pumps out a theoretical bandwidth of 336.0 GB/s. The card features 8+6 Pin connectors which power the board, display outputs include DVI, HDMI and three display ports which come as a part of reference Maxwell configuration and has a TDP of 250W.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti With Full DirectX 12 Support
Our buddies at Videocardz were able to confirm a very significant bit that shows how Maxwell is designed to be fully compliant with new generation technology that is the DirectX 12 API. We have talked a lot about DirectX 12 and detailed various features such as the recent Multiadapter tech that will allow use of the dormant iGPUs on PCs and combining VRAM pools across cards, supporting Multi-GPU configurations natively. The GeForce 900 series cards were designed from scratch to support these new technologies and GTX 980 Ti will leverage support by being the first DirectX 12 enabled card with Feature Level 12_1 support that allows conservative raster and raster order views aside from the Level 12_0 features that include Tiled Resources, Typed UAV access and Bindless textures. NVIDIA also confirms that they will have Maxwell doing Asynchronous compute that AMD has recently shown off the benefits for in their slides. Their will be more control over hardware by the developers and low overhead will allow more draw calls and better performance for PC hardware.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Review Round-Up:
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6 GB Review @ Anandtech
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6 GB Review @ TechReport
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6 GB Review @ PCPerspective
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6 GB Review @ Hardwarecanucks
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6 GB Review @ Computerbase
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6 GB Review @ Sweclockers
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6 GB Review @ Guru3D
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6 GB Review @ Techpowerup
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6 GB Review @ Kitguru
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6 GB Review @ Hexus
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6 GB Review @ Eteknix
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6 GB Review @ Expreview
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 4K Benchmarks(Courtesy of HWBattle):
HWBattle has now uploaded the first 4K benchmarks of the card which show the GeForce GTX 980 Ti providing similar results as the GeForce GTX Titan X on the same resolution. It seems like the GeForce GTX 980 Ti will be a killer deal for 4K users as two of these cards can crunch through games quite well.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Benchmarks:
The stunning custom designs we seen yesterday can be found here. What really needs to be talked right now are the benchmarks. The card runs cool, performs cool and the 4K to 1600P benchmarks that were revealed today show stellar performance for the NVIDIA flagship 900 series card. What remains to be seen is how far will the custom designs push this performance as they are some beast designs with as much as 300-350 MHz overclocked speeds. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti launches tomorrow at a price of $649 US, expect more custom variants to show up in a few hours.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Price Cut Paves Way For $499 US Pricing
One more major announcement from NVIDIA side came that the GeForce GTX 980 is officially getting a price cut. The new price $49 US cut, while not significant, will allow users to purchase new cards at $499 US which makes the pricing structure of Maxwell cards more sensible. We saw a similar price cut to GTX 780 when the GeForce GTX 780 Ti launched and we are looking at the same happening again. The $499 US pricing is quite good considering the card is bundled with two AAA blockbuster titles. The GeForce GTX 970 and 960 remain at their official price points since they are quite competitive with their $329 and $199 prices.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Final Specifications:
| Card | NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPU | 28nm GM200-400 | 28nm GM200-310 | 28nm GM204-400 | 28nm GM204-200 |
| CUDA Cores | 3072 | 2816 | 2048 | 1664 |
| TMUs | 192 | 176 | 128 | 112 |
| ROPs | 96 | 96 | 64 | 56 |
| Core clock | 1002 MHz | 1000 MHz | 1127 MHz | 1050 MHz |
| Boost Clock | 1089 MHz | 1076 MHz | 1215 MHz | 1178 MHz |
| Memory Clock | 1753 MHz | 1753 MHz | 1753 MHz | 1753 MHz |
| Memory Bus | 384-bit | 384-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory | 12GB GDDR5 | 6GB GDDR5 | 4GB GDDR5 | 4GB GDDR5 |
| Bandwidth | 336 GB/s | 336 GB/s | 224 GB/s | 224 GB/s |
| TDP | 250W | 250W | 165W | 150W |
| Power Connectors | 1x 6pin; 1x 8pin | 1x 6pin; 1x 8pin | 2x 6pin | 2x 6pin |
| Display Outputs | 1x DVI, 1x HDMI, 3x DP | 1x DVI, 1x HDMI, 3x DP | 1x DVI, 1x HDMI, 3x DP | 1x DVI, 1x HDMI, 3x DP |
| Launch MSRP | $999 US | $649 US | $549 US | $329 US |
| Current MSRP | $999 US | ~$450 US | ~$379 US | ~$279 US |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Official Pictures:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti PCB Shots:
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