The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Review
by Ryan Smith on May 31, 2015 6:00 PM ESTSynthetics
As always we’ll also take a quick look at synthetic performance. Being a virtual copy of the GTX Titan X, GTX 980 Ti should perform very similarly here, just as we've seen in our gaming tests.
Compared to GTX Titan X, GTX 980 Ti does technically lose 2 Polymorph Engines as a result of losing 2 SMMs. However as with our games, this doesn’t really hinder GTX 980 Ti, leading it being within a few percent of GTX Titan X on tessellation performance.
As for texel and pixel fillrates, the results are both as-expected and a bit surprising. On the expected side, we see the GTX 980 Ti trail GTX Titan X by a bit, again taking a hit from the SMM loss. On the other hand we’re seeing a larger than expected drop in the pixel fill rates. GTX 980 Ti loses some rasterization throughput from the SMM loss, but a 15% drop in this test is much larger than 2 SMMs. Just to be sure we checked to make sure the ROP/MC configuration of GTX 980 Ti was unchanged at 96 ROPs, so while we can explain 10% or so (GTX 980 Ti doesn't have its clockspeed advantage in such a short test), we're at a loss to fully explain the last 5%. The short run time of the test also makes it more varaible than other tests, so that may be the last 5%.
Though in either case, despite what 3DMark is telling us, we aren’t seeing any signs of GTX 980 Ti struggling at 4K versus GTX Titan X. So if there is a meaningful difference in pixel fillrates, it’s not impacting game performance.
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Michael Bay - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Oh come on, have some mercy. ^_^D. Lister - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Peace. :)chizow - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Will it change the results of 97% of a Titan X's performance for 65% of the price? If not, why do you care?Randomoneh - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Some users are using applications where they need all the VRAM available @ full speed.chizow - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
And for those users there is Titan X and/or Tesla.mapesdhs - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link
They already answered your question. Fact is, the whole 970 RAM issue is totally irrelevant. Nobody has shown any game that exhibits problematic behaviour as a result of how the card works, none of it changes how good the card is based on initial reviews, and anyone doing something that needs close to 4GB RAM is probably in need of greater baseline horsepower than a 970 anyway, so who the hell cares?The 980 Ti runs at full speed across the board, check the ROP specs, etc.
loguerto - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
lesson n° 1: never buy a titan!mapesdhs - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link
Unless you're a prosumer and need all the VRAM you can get. Titan X is ideal for AE, various types of GPU heavy rendering, compute involving SP only, etc. Seen a guy on another forum saying he loves his Titan X for compute because of its huge RAM.TheinsanegamerN - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
I cant wait to see what Third party coolers, with 8 phase vrms and big coolers are capable of. As someone with a 1200p screen, this gpu could well serve 5+ years.chizow - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
Great card, performance and price! Nvidia is certainly being very aggressive with pricing this part, all without any competition from AMD!This is going to put a lot of pressure on anything AMD does in June. As the review stated, AMD's new GPU has a pretty tough act to follow for a $650 mini-Titan X and as we have already seen, AMD won't be competitive in the $500 and lower price point if they come to market with a stack of rebrands.