A Detailed Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti Review

Maxwell-based graphics cards, such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti, is designed for high-end desktop use. Compared to the GTX 980, the GM200 has 2,816 CUDA cores and is produced at 28 nm. The 980Ti was, with the NVidia Titan X (With more graphics RAM but the same CPU), the single-chip graphics card for mostly desktops that was the most potent and fastest available in 2015. Pascal-based GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080 cards from 2016 were quicker and used less power due to the new architecture and 16-nm manufacturing process, respectively. This guide has a complete Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti review.

Design and Features

As opposed to the GeForce GTX 980, the new version GeForce GTX 980 Ti is more of a streamlined version of the old GeForce GTX Titan X, with the accent on "slightly" rather than "much" downsized. The GM200 graphics processor used in the GeForce GTX Titan X, which is the company's most powerful single-GPU chip based on the Maxwell architecture, is also used in this graphics card. However, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti only has 176 texture units and 2,816 CUDA cores compared to Titan X's 3,072 cores and 192 units, respectively.

A 1,000MHz base clock rate may be boosted to 1,075MHz when situations require and thermals allow, much like the GeForce GTX Titan X's. Nvidia claims that the GeForce GTX 980 Ti has 50% greater memory peak bandwidth than a GeForce GTX 980, even though it only has half the GDDDR5 memory of the GeForce GTX Titan X of memory 12GB.

Nvidia claims that the GTX 980 Ti has 38% more CUDA cores and texture units than the original GeForce GTX 980. The non-Ti version is inferior to this one, as we'll see when testing it. But if you want unmatchable gaming in 4K, you'll still need to shell out the cash for a second GeForce card to use in SLI or go with a dual-GPU alternative like AMD's Radeon R9 295X2 if you want the best experience possible.

Forward-Looking Features

For the software side of things, the latest version of Microsoft's DirectX gaming as well as multimedia-centric API, known as DirectX 12, will be launching with Windows 10 at some point in the latter half of 2015, as is only natural. According to Nvidia, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti would be ready to take on the additional gaming-detail advantages that DX12 will provide, such as more realistic smoke and fire effects as well as improved lighting and shading. This is something that has been highly anticipated. Reduced burden on the computer's processing power is purportedly another option.

In addition, Nvidia claims that the GeForce GTX 980 Ti would support an advanced set of features of DirectX 12 called "DX 12_1." This feature set includes adding a vertical element towards how games could handle texture tiles, as well as a conservative raster attribute, which is anticipated to assist in making ray-traced shadows appear smoother for more realistic and less taxing real-time shadows.

Performance Testing

Be aware that we tested this card using the default settings that came with it out of the box before diving into the details (the GeForce GTX Titan X, for example, has the same base and boost clock speeds of 1,000MHz and 1,075MHz). You may, of course, attempt to overclock the card even more by obtaining a GPU overclocking program, such as the PrecisionX 16 software offered by EVGA, and using it. Overclocking wasn't possible because of the time restrictions we faced while working on this project.

We anticipated the gaming performance of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti and Titan X to be comparable because of their similar specifications. This turned out to be the case, but we weren't prepared for how closely. In a handful of our tests, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti outperformed the GeForce GTX Titan X. The advantage the GeForce GTX 980 Ti has over the GeForce GTX Titan X is most likely the result of driver improvements since our last review of the Titan X. Even said, for PC gamers, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti is the apparent pick because of the significant price difference.

Conclusion

The GTX 980 Ti's two-word summation is this: It's beautiful! Other games, such as Assassin's Creed: Unity, may have issues with 4GB VRAM, which is why we didn't include benchmarks for them. Many games now use more than 2GB of RAM, thanks to the 8GB total RAM on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. We've quickly moved from 2GB being "enough" to 6GB or more being "required" to ensure optimal quality, especially with the advent of 4K monitors. For those who don't want to go with the Titan X, the 980 Ti has adequate VRAM and some.