Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti review

[Administrator]

We knew it was coming, of course - it was just the speed of its arrival that took us off-guard. Nvidia's astonishing Titan X graphics card, based on the 8bn transistor GM200 processor, redefined the boundaries of single-GPU performance when we reviewed it back in March. Imagine the firm's previous flagship - the GTX 980 - combined with a mainstream GTX 960 in a single package, backed by a ridiculous 12GB of 7gbps GDDR5 and you have a remarkable technological achievement. The only problem was its price - $999. The new GTX 980 Ti is a mildly cut-back version of the same product, offering around 98 per cent of the raw performance at 65 per cent of the price.
That's not a bad outcome bearing in mind the extent of the compromises Nvidia has made. The 3072 cores of the Titan X get cut-down by a factor of nine per cent, two shader clusters disabled to give us a final tally of 2816 stream processors. By extension, we lose some texture mapping units too - dropping from 196 in Titan X to 176 in the GTX 980 Ti. However, the biggest cutback is perhaps the most inconsequential of all, bearing in mind the current gaming landscape. The mammoth 12GB of GDDR5 found in the top-end flagship is pared back to a still lavish, but more reasonable 6GB. However, memory speeds remain the same, core and boost clocks are identical, and unlike the GTX 970, Nvidia's cutbacks have not come at the expense of ROPs or bandwidth - both are identical to Titan X. To be clear, this time there are no split-memory shenanigans.
Graphics cards are parallel by nature, distributing work across however many cores are available. That being the case, it's a totally reasonable assumption to suggest that losing around nine per cent of the computational power should result in a similar drop to overall performance. However, raw processing power is just one element of the equation and in a card which is seemingly already hitting bottlenecks elsewhere within the system (be it the driver, the DX11 API or the CPU), the reality is that the GTX 980 Ti is virtually interchangeable with its much more expensive sibling.
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