After months of speculation, NVIDIA has finally released the GTX 980 Ti for $650. The 980 Ti is meant to be a middle ground between the powerful GTX Titan X and the flagship GTX 980. Surprisingly, the performance is actually just about the same as a Titan X.
The technical specifications are quite impressive, but they are actually not that far off from the Titan X. This is mainly due to the fact that both of the GPUs are based off of the GM200 chip, with the 980 Ti being a slightly slimmed down version. The 980 Ti has 2 less SM clusters (resulting in 256 less CUDA cores), 16 less texture units, and only 6GB of RAM.
The most remarkable aspect of the 980 Ti is its relative performance to the $1000 Titan X. In most games, the two cards have nearly identical frame rates. Due to the slightly slimmer specs, one would assume the 980 Ti to fall behind. However, the clock speed of the GTX 980 Ti typically boosts to a higher frequency when gaming. The exact reason for this is unknown, but it makes the two cards have nearly the same number of frames per second while gaming.
While the performance of the new card may excite many gamers who have been looking to buy a new GPU, it probably leaves a lot of Titan X buyers with buyers remorse. When the original Titan card was released, it was pitched as a prosumer card. While it was very capable of gaming, it also had excellent FP64 (double-precision point) performance. Unfortunately, this is not the case for the Titan X and it is certainly not an optimal card for workstation use.
Due to this, the only real reason to get a Titan X would be bragging rights. The most substantial difference between the cards is the 6GB of DDR5 vs 12GB of DDR5. For most modern games though, 6GB should be plenty and the 12GB would rarely be fully utilized. This really brings the question of what NVIDIA had in mind when they released the Titan X three months ago. Was it just a high price tag for gamers who couldn’t wait for GM200? It certainly seems like it.
In addition to the release of the card itself, NVIDIA also released some new technologies simultaneously. The biggest of which is GameWorks VR. This new API is very similar to the pre-existing GameWorks API, except it is specifically catered towards virtual reality gaming. Due to the problems GameWorks has caused in the industry, it’ll be interesting to see how GameWorks VR.
There was also some new updates to NVIDIA’s variable refresh rate technology, G-Sync. Mobile G-Sync has been officially launched, but it’s existence was already known due to a leaked driver. This also brings in the question of whether G-Sync really needs a hardware module to work properly. Additionally, G-Sync can now work on Windowed games.
Source and benchmarks: PCPerspective
Credit to Crooks for bringing this topic to our attention.
