The GTX 980 Ti is the undisputed top-end gaming champion and will play all current titles at 4K resolutions
Nvidia might already have one of the fastest graphics cards on the
planet in the GeForce Titan X, but it was very much the Bugatti Veyron
of GPUs; insanely fast, overkill for almost everyone and ludicrously
expensive. Unless you were in serious need of graphics memory, which the
Titan X has in spades, it was difficult to justify the incredible £800+
price. Nvidia sensibly left enough of a price gap between the Titan X
and the £400 GTX 980 to fit in a card that could compete with AMD's
impending Fury X: the GTX 980 Ti.
THE GPU
The 980 Ti is essentially a scaled-down GeForce Titan X, although
there's hardly a massive gulf between the two cards. Both use the same
GM200 GPU, which is based on Nvidia's energy-efficient Maxwell
architecture and manufactured on a 28nm process. Both run at a 1GHz base
clock and boost to 1,075MHz. Both have the same 250W TDP, and with
effective cooling should prove to be monstrous overclockers.
There are differences, though. Nvidia has reduced the number of CUDA
cores from 3,072 to 2,816, lowered the texture units from 192 to 176 and
removed a pair of streaming multiprocessors (SMMs), leaving 22 rather
than the 24 found in the Titan X. The GTX 980 Ti has 6GB of GDDR5
memory, compared to the Titan X's 12GB, although because both cards use a
384-bit memory bus and clock the RAM chips at an effective 7GHz, they
have the same 336GB/sec peak memory bandwidth.
THE CARD
At 267mm long, the 980 Ti is no larger than Nvidia's current top-end
graphics cards, and as such should fit inside most ATX cases without
needing to remove drive cages. The green backlit logo is a nice touch,
illuminating the interior of your case and giving you something to look
at if you have a windowed side panel. There's one six-pin and one
eight-pin PCI-Express power socket on the front edge of the card as it
sits in your case, which should help you keep cables in check. Two SLI
connections will even let you run four cards in SLI, if your motherboard
(and bank balance) will support it.
Naturally for a card designed to play games at 4K resolutions, the
GTX 980 Ti has three DisplayPort 1.2 ports on the back for hooking up to
Ultra HD monitors. It also has a single HDMI 2.0 port, meaning you can
hook it up to a 4K TV, and dual-link DVI.
The GTX 980 Ti is a fully DirectX 12-compliant card, meaning it can
take advantage of more realistic smoke, fire and material effects once
developers start using the DirectX 12 API in their games. It also works
with Nvidia's G-Sync adaptive refresh technology, meaning you can
eliminate screen tear in games when playing on a compatible G-Sync
monitor. Add in optimisations for virtual reality gaming, including
multi-resolution shading to only render the pixels visible through the
spherical lenses of a VR headset, and the GTX 980 Ti is about a
future-proof as it's possible to get.
PERFORMANCE
Unlike the Titan X, which was only available as a reference design
card, Nvidia is letting its board partners release GTX 980 Ti cards with
custom coolers and out-of-the-box overclocks. We've looked at the
reference design, complete with Nvidia's standard radial fan blower
heatsink. It's surprisingly quiet in use, and managed to keep the GPU
core below 60 degrees Celsius throughout our testing.
With the GTX 980 Ti installed in our reference PC, it quickly became
clear that no games can trouble the card at 1,920x1,080. Dirt Showdown
produced a silky 126.8fps with Ultra settings and 4x MSAA. Even with
demanding super sampling anti-aliasing (SSAA) and Ultra detail enabled,
we saw incredibly smooth frame rates in both Tomb Raider and Metro: Last
Light Redux, at 156fps and 64fps respectively.
Stepping up to 2,560x1,440 wasn't enough to make the 980 Ti sweat,
either. Dirt Showdown maintained a fantastic 115.2fps and Tomb Raider
stayed strong at 78.1fps. Metro begins to drop below the perfectly
playable 60 frames per second, producing 40.7fps, but disabling
anti-aliasing boosted this back to 78.1fps.
It's only when playing at 4K resolutions that we begin to see the
limits of the card. Dirt Showdown was still a perfectly playable
69.7fps, but Tomb Raider dropped to 30fps and Metro stumbled down to
17.7fps. However, SSAA anti-aliasing isn't realistic at this resolution;
it renders the game at double your desired resolution before
downscaling it, meaning at 4K games were effectively being rendered at
8K. Switching to the far less demanding FXAA resulted in a much smoother
51.2fps in Tomb Raider, and 37.2fps in Metro: Last Light Redux.
Anti-aliasing isn't really required at such high resolutions, so we're
confident that almost every game will be playable at 4K on this card.
We overclocked the 980 Ti using EVGA's Precision X utility, and were
blown away with how much extra performance we were able to eke out of
the card. After adding 250MHz to the core clock and 150MHz to the
memory, we managed to get Metro: Last Light Redux to a much smoother
44fps at 4K resolution, and could even play Tomb Raider at 4K with SSAA
and the AMD-specific TressFX hair rendering at 47.9fps.
CONCLUSION
Right now, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti is the fastest single graphics card around. The newly announced
AMD Fury X
reportedly matches it for frame rates at 4K, but we’ll have to wait
until we get one in for testing to see if the AMD card's high-bandwidth
memory architecture puts it on a level playing field with Nvidia's card
at 1,920x1,080 and 2,560x1,400 resolutions too. We'd be more than a
little cross if we'd invested in a Titan X, as the GTX 980 Ti isn’t much
slower but is almost £300 cheaper.
Like the Titan X, the GTX 980 Ti is overkill for 1080p resolutions.
However, anyone with multiple 2,560x1,440 resolution displays or a 4K
monitor will reap the benefits. It's a big investment, particularly if
you opt for a custom-cooled, overclocked model from one of Nvidia's
board partners, but you can rest assured that you'll be able to play the
latest games at the highest frame rates for a long time to come.
| Hardware |
| Slots taken up |
2 |
| GPU |
Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 ti |
| GPU cores |
2,816 |
| GPU clock speed |
1GHz |
| GPU clock boost speed |
1,075MHz |
| Memory |
6GB GDDR5 |
| Memory interface |
384-bit |
| Max memory bandwidth |
336.5GB/s |
| Memory speed |
7GHz |
| Graphics card length |
267mm |
| DVI outputs |
1 |
| D-sub outputs |
0 |
| HDMI outputs |
1 |
| Mini HDMI outputs |
0 |
| DisplayPort outputs |
3 |
| Mini DisplayPort outputs |
0 |
| Power leads required |
1x 8-pin PCI Express, 1x 6-pin PCI Express |
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