Get TITAN X performance for $649

Two years ago, NVIDIA released the first consumer big Kepler part as the GTX TITAN and followed it up a few months later with the further-cut-down and cheaper GTX 780. NVIDIA is repeating this process with big Maxwell by announcing the GTX 980 Ti. One difference between the two cards is that while the TITAN X has 12 GB of memory, the 980 Ti has 6 GB.



If you’re worried that the 980 Ti may have the “3.5 GB + 0.5 GB” issue of the 970, then fear not, because that isn’t the case this time.

The 980 Ti has 92% of the shader performance (both base and boost clocks) and 100% of the memory bandwidth of the TITAN X, although the real-world performance difference is much smaller. The GM200 chip in the 980 Ti and newer TITAN X’s have been tweaked for a small clock speed boost in practice compared to older GM200 chips. In games, the stock 980 Ti comes to an average of 96-97% of the TITAN X, but it costs $350 less.



While the overall gap is small, it is fairly consistent. The TITAN X stays ahead of the 980 Ti in almost every benchmark, even if the lead is by less than one frame per second. Grand Theft Auto V is one exception, and I wonder if the 980 Ti is boosting higher in this particular game and setting. In TechPowerUp’s 84 game benchmarks (21 games x 4 resolution settings per game), the 980 Ti won in only 5 of them (3 of which were in 1600x900). I’m surprised that NVIDIA set the 980 Ti to be so close to the TITAN X in performance, especially when the TITAN X doesn’t even have the fast double precision rate of the original TITAN to set it apart from the other consumer cards. For comparison, the 780 had on average 92% of the performance of the original TITAN. There is now little reason to get the TITAN X unless you need more than 6 GB of VRAM.

Recall that 2nd generation Maxwell (GM2xx parts) have improved delta color compression over previous NVIDIA parts. Although the Maxwell-based 980 Ti and the Kepler-based 780 Ti have the same theoretical maximum bandwidth (7 Gbps memory and a 384-bit bus for 336 GB/s), the former performs much better in texture tests, especially with the easily compressible black texture.


(The R9 290X has ROP limitations that prevent it from doing well in this test.)

The numbers below are from TechPowerUp, normalized so that the TITAN X = 100.

Code:

             3840x2160  2560x1440  1920x1080
R9 295X2           123        104         92
GTX TITAN X        100        100        100
GTX 980 Ti          96         96         97
GTX 980             75         77         80
R9 290X             70         69         69
GTX 780 Ti          67         68         72
R9 280X             51         51         51
GTX 770             44         47         51

28 nm has been with us for the past 3.5 years and is likely to be around in many discrete GPUs for about another year. The first high-end 28 nm parts were the HD 7970 and the GTX 680, which the R9 280X and GTX 770 above are slightly faster versions of. We’ve come a long way on 28 nm, and I’m excited for what’s ahead with 14/16 nm.

Sources: AnandTech, TechPowerUp, The Tech Report

 

I'm surprised that there's such a gap between the 980 and 980 ti. I figured they would cut the smm difference and go with 20, or perhaps 21 since yields are good. But 22? I hope that means Fiji is worth caring about.

One neat little tidbit is that while most games put the titan x and 980 ti neck and neck, project cars shows a very tangible difference between them. Fascinating.





Oh and is anyone else losing their goddamn mind over Anandtech's overclock? They got the damn card to a 25% core overclock and 8ghz vram. I can't even

 

New AMD cards means price drops for NVidia and a lot of second hand and refurb cards on the market. Waiting a month or two could save quite a bit.

 

where's the "I just bought a gtx 970" option?

 

You're waiting for newer gpus, presumably on something smaller than 28nm (lol, like that will ever happen).

The hunt for computer parts is never over, only delayed.

 

Wake me up when gpu price stops being retarded again.

 

Waiting for smaller process nm with stacked vram.
8GB graphics cards will be more commonplace then.

 

wake me when CPU prices drop and the $ crashes.

 

That is a very nice card, but I am totally convinced that the main reason for this card to be so close to the Titan, is the upcoming AMD high-bandwidth-memory card. It seems to be that AMD has something very nice coming, Nvidia basically confirmed it.

Yup, it's pointless for anyone in the euro zone to shop for Intel CPUs at the moment. It would be a great time to get a new system otherwise, considering DDR3 RAM is being sold of.

 

I'll jump from DDR2 directly to DDR4 + quadcore xeon.

 

Yeah, amd and Nvidia know what each other are doing, so my hopes are up for fiji. Only a few more weeks...