The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review: Maxwell Mark 2
by Ryan Smith on September 18, 2014 10:30 PM ESTFinal Words
When NVIDIA launched the first Maxwell cards earlier this year, we knew that we would be in for a treat with their latest architecture. Though just a fragment of the performance of what their eventual high-end cards would be, NVIDIA’s first Maxwell cards offered an interesting look at an architecture that would be capable of doubling NVIDIA’s performance per watt on the same 28nm TSMC manufacturing process they started with over 2 years ago. To that end I don’t think there has been any doubt that NVIDIA’s eventual second generation Maxwell cards would be equally amazing when it comes to power efficiency, but I feel NVIDIA has still impressed us when it comes to performance, features, and pricing.
In many ways it feels like this latest launch has returned us to the PC video card industry of 2012. NVIDIA’s flagship consumer card is once again powered by a smaller and more potent consumer-class x04 GPU, and once again NVIDIA is swinging the one-two punch of performance and power efficiency. When GTX 680 was launched it set a new high mark for the video card industry, and now we see GTX 980 do more of the same. The GTX 980 is faster, less power hungry, and quieter than the Radeon R9 290X, so once again NVIDIA has landed the technical trifecta. Even if we’re just looking at performance and pricing the GTX 980 is the undisputed holder of the single-GPU performance crown, besting everything else AMD and NVIDIA have to offer, and offering it at a price that while no means a steal is more than reasonable given NVIDIA’s technical and performance advantage. As such GTX 980 comes very, very close to doing to Radeon R9 290X what GTX 680 did to Radeon HD 7970 over 2 years ago.
Meanwhile from a feature perspective the GTX 900 series is going to prove to be a very captivating product. Dynamic Super Resolution is a brutish-yet-clever solution of what to do about anti-aliasing on today's deferred renderer games that cannot support traditional MSAA/SSAA, and while I’m withholding my judgment on Multi-Frame sampled Anti-Aliasing until it’s made available to users in NVIDIA’s drivers, the idea at least has merit. Otherwise I am very happy to see that NVIDIA has now fully caught up to the competition in terms of baseline API features by offering everything needed to support Direct3D 11.2 and beyond.
Along those lines, NVIDIA’s focus on voxel technology for Maxwell 2 is a very interesting route to take, and I am eagerly anticipating seeing whether it gets widely adopted and what developers do with it. VXGI is a very neat concept to generate voxel based global illumination, and building in the features necessary to do significant portions of it in hardware is a wise move by NVIDIA. The catch at this point is the same catch that faces all vendor specific technologies: just because the hardware is there doesn’t mean developers will put it to good use, especially in this age of console ports. NVIDIA for their part has made the right move by making sure VXGI will run on other hardware, but I am concerned that the performance delta means that it’s only going to be viable on Maxwell 2 GPUs for now, which could discourage developers. None the less we do need better lighting in games, and I hope this encourages developers to finally adopt these kinds of high quality global illumination systems.
As for the hardware itself, is there anything left to say other than that GTX 980 is a well-built, well-engineered card? The build quality is impeccable – raising the bar over even GTX Titan – and the power efficiency gains are truly remarkable. With a TDP lower than even GTX 680, this is the lowest power consumption has been for a chart-topping card since 9800 GTX over half a decade ago. It’s really a bit of a honeymoon period since if and when NVIDIA does Big Maxwell one has to expect power consumption will go back up, but for the time being it’s very pleasing to be able to get chart-topping performance inside of 165W. And the fact that this comes from the same company responsible for GTX 480 just 2 generations ago makes this the ultimate technical turnaround.
In conclusion, the GeForce GTX 980 represents another stellar performance from NVIDIA. Their reign at the top is not going to go unchallenged – AMD can’t match NVIDIA on performance, but they can sure drive down prices – but as was the case in 2012 the crown continues to securely reside in NVIDIA’s hands, and once again they have done the technical hard work to earn it.
Finally, as a reminder we will be following up this article next week with our look at GTX 980 SLI performance and a look at the GTX 970. Of the two cards launched today the GTX 970 is without a doubt the more interesting of the two thanks to its relatively low price compared to the performance NVIDIA is offering, but due to our aforementioned board issues we will not be able to take a look at it until next week. So until then stay tuned for the rest of our GM204 coverage.
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TheJian - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/09/19/maxwell-an...Did I miss it in the article or did you guys just purposely forget to mention NV claims it does DX12 too? see their own blog. Microsoft's DX12 demo runs on ...MAXWELL. Did I just miss the DX12 talk in the article? Every other review I've read mentions this (techpowerup, tomshardware, hardocp etc etc). Must be that AMD Center still having it's effect on your articles ;)
They were running a converted elemental demo (converted to dx12) and Fable Legends from MS. Yet curiously missing info from this site's review. No surprise I guess with only an AMD portal still :(
From the link above:
"Part of McMullen’s presentation was the announcement of a broadly accessible early access program for developers wishing to target DX12. Microsoft will supply the developer with DX12, UE4-DX12 and the source for Epic’s Elemental demo ported to run on the DX12-based engine. In his talk, McMullen demonstrated Maxwell running Elemental at speed and flawlessly. As a development platform for this effort, NVIDIA’s GeForce GPUs and Maxwell in particular is a natural vehicle for DX12 development."
So maxwell is a dev platform for dx12, but you guys leave that little detail out so newbs will think it doesn't do it? Major discussion of dx11 stuff missing before, now up to 11.3 but no "oh and it runs all of dx12 btw".
One more comment on 980: If it's a reference launch how come other sites already have OC versions (IE, tomshardware has a Windforce OC 980, though stupidly as usual they downclocked it and the two OC/superclocked 970's they had to ref clocks...ROFL - like you'd buy an OC card and downclock them)? IT seems to be a launch of OC all around. Newegg even has them in stock (check EVGA OC version):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
And with a $10 rebate so only $559 and a $5 gift card also.
"This model is factory overclocked to 1241 MHz Base Clock/1342 MHz Boost Clock (1126 MHz/1216 MHz for reference design)"
Who would buy ref for $10 diff? IN fact the ref cards are $569 at newegg, so you save buying the faster card...LOL.
cactusdog - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
TheJian, Wow, Did you read the article? Did you read the conclusion? AT says the 980 is "remarkable" , "well engineered", "impeccable design" and has "no competition" They covered almost all of Nvidia marketing talking points and you're going to accuse them of a conspiracy? Are you fking retarded??Daniel Egger - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
It would be nice to rather than just talk about about the 750 Ti to also include it in comparisons to see it clearer in perspective what it means to go from Maxwell I to Maxwell II in terms of performance, power consumption, noise and (while we are at it) performance per Watt and performance per $.Also where're the benchmarks for the GTX 970? I sure respect that this card is in a different ballpark but the somewhat reasonable power output might actually make the GTX 970 a viable candidate for an HTPC build. Is it also possible to use it with just one additional 6 Pin connector (since as you mentioned this would be within the specs without any overclocking) or does it absolutely need 2 of them?
SkyBill40 - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
As was noted in the review at least twice, they were having issues with the 970 and thus it won't be tested in full until next week (along with the 980 in SLI).MrSpadge - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
Wow! This makes me upgrade from a GTX660Ti - not because of gaming (my card is fast enough for my needs) but because of the power efficiency gains for GP-GPU (running GPU-Grid under BOINC). Thank you nVidia for this marvelous chip and fair prices!jarfin - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
i still CANT understand amd 'uber' option.its totally out of test,bcoz its just 'oc'd' button,nothing else.
its must be just r290x and not anantech 'amd canter' way uber way.
and,i cant help that feeling,what is strong,that anatech is going badly amd company way,bcoz they have 'amd center own sector.
so,its mean ppl cant read them review for nvidia vs radeon cards race without thinking something that anatech keep raden side way or another.
and,its so clear thats it.
btw
i hope anantech get clear that amd card R9200 series is just competition for nvidia 90 series,bcoz that every1 kow amd skippedd 8000 series and put R9 200 series for nvidia 700 series,but its should be 8000 series.
so now,generation of gpu both side is even.
meaning that next amd r9 300 series or what it is coming amd company battle nvidia NEXT level gpu card,NOT 900 series.
there is clear both gpu card history for net.
thank you all
p.s. where is nvidia center??
Gigaplex - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
Uber mode is not an overclock. It's a fan speed profile change to reduce thermal throttling (underclock) at the expense of noise.dexgen - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
Ryan, Is it possible to see the average clock speeds in different tests after increasing the power and temperature limit in afterburner?And also once the review units for non-reference cards come in it would be very nice to see what the average clock speeds for different cards with and without increased power limit would be. That would be a great comparison for people deciding which card to buy.
silverblue - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
Exceptional by NVIDIA; it's always good to see a more powerful yet more frugal card especially at the top end.AMD's power consumption could be tackled - at least partly - by some re-engineering. Do they need a super-wide memory bus when NVIDIA are getting by with half the width and moderately faster RAM? Tonga has lossless delta colour compression which largely negates the need for a wide bus, although they did shoot themselves in the foot by not clocking the memory a little higher to anticipate situations where this may not help the 285 overcome the 280.
Perhaps AMD could divert some of their scant resources towards shoring up their D3D performance to calm down some of the criticism because it does seem like they're leaving performance on the table and perhaps making Mantle look better than it might be as a result.
Luke212 - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
Where are the SGEMM compute benchmarks you used to put on high end reviews?