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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garadante - Sunday, September 21, 2014 - link
What might be interesting is doing a comparison of video cards for a specific framerate target to (ideally, perhaps it wouldn't actually work like this?) standardize the CPU usage and thus CPU power usage across greatly differing cards. And then measure the power consumed by each card. In this way, couldn't you get a better example ofgaradante - Sunday, September 21, 2014 - link
Whoops, hit tab twice and it somehow posted my comment. Continued:couldn't you get a better example of the power efficiency for a particular card and then meaningful comparisons between different cards? I see lots of people mentioning how the 980 seems to be drawing far more watts than it's rated TDP (and I'd really like someone credible to come in and state how heat dissipated and energy consumed are related. I swear they're the exact same number as any energy consumed by transistors would, after everything, be released as heat, but many people disagree here in the comments and I'd like a final say). Nvidia can slap whatever TDP they want on it and it can be justified by some marketing mumbo jumbo. Intel uses their SDPs, Nvidia using a 165 watt TDP seems highly suspect. And please, please use a nonreference 290X in your reviews, at least for a comparison standpoint. Hasn't it been proven that having cooling that isn't garbage and runs the GPU closer to high 60s/low 70s can lower power consumption (due to leakage?) something on the order of 20+ watts with the 290X? Yes there's justification in using reference products but lets face it, the only people who buy reference 290s/290Xs were either launch buyers or people who don't know better (there's the blower argument but really, better case exhaust fans and nonreference cooling destroys that argument).
So basically I want to see real, meaningful comparisons of efficiencies for different cards at some specific framerate target to standardize CPU usage. Perhaps even monitoring CPU usage over the course of the test and reporting average, minimum, peak usage? Even using monitoring software to measure CPU power consumption in watts (as I'm fairly sure there are reasonably accurate ways of doing this already, as I know CoreTemp reports it as its probably just voltage*amperage, but correct me if I'm wrong) and reported again average, minimum, peak usage would be handy. It would be nice to see if Maxwell is really twice as energy efficient as GCN1.1 or if it's actually much closer. If it's much closer all these naysayers prophesizing AMD's doom are in for a rude awakening. I wouldn't put it past Nvidia to use marketing language to portray artificially low TDPs.
silverblue - Sunday, September 21, 2014 - link
Apparently, compute tasks push the power usage way up; stick with gaming and it shouldn't.fm123 - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Don't confuse TDP with power consumption, they are not the same thing. TDP is for designing the thermal solution to maintain the chip temperature. If there is more headroom in the chip temperature, then the system can operate faster, consuming more power."Intel defines TDP as follows: The upper point of the thermal profile consists of the Thermal Design Power (TDP) and the associated Tcase value. Thermal Design Power (TDP) should be used for processor thermal solution design targets. TDP is not the maximum power that the processor can dissipate. TDP is measured at maximum TCASE"
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&...
NeatOman - Sunday, September 21, 2014 - link
I just realized that the GTX 980 has a TDP of 165 watts, my Corsair CX430 watt PSU is almost overkill!, that's nuts. That's even enough room to give the whole system a very good stable overclock. Right now i have a pair of HD 7850's @ stock speed and a FX-8320 @ 4.5Ghz, good thing the Corsair puts out over 430 watts perfectly clean :)Nfarce - Sunday, September 21, 2014 - link
While a good power supply, you are leaving yourself little headroom with 430W. I'm surprised you are getting away with it with two 7850s and not experiencing system crashes.ET - Sunday, September 21, 2014 - link
The 980 is an impressive feat of engineering. Fewer transistors, fewer compute units, less power and better performance... NVIDIA has done a good job here. I hope that AMD has some good improvements of its own under its sleeve.garadante - Sunday, September 21, 2014 - link
One thing to remember is they probably save a -ton- of die area/transistors by giving it only what, 1/32 double precision rate? I wonder how competitive in terms of transistors/area an AMD GPU would be if they gutted double precision compute and went for a narrower, faster memory controller.Farwalker2u - Sunday, September 21, 2014 - link
I am looking forward to your review of the GTX 970 once you have a compatible sample in hand.I would like to see the results of the Folding @Home benchmarks. It seems that this site is the only one that consistently use that benchmark in its reviews.
As a "Folder" I'd like to see any indication that the GTX 970, at a cost of $330 and drawing less watts than a GTX 780; may out produce both the 780 ($420 - $470) and the 780Ti ($600). I will be studying the Folding @ Home: Explicit, Single Precision chart which contains the test results of the GTX 970.
Wolfpup - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Wow, this is impressive stuff. 10% more performance from 2/3 the power? That'll be great for desktops, but of course even better for notebooks. Very impressed they could pulll off that kind of leap on the same process!They've already managed to significantly bump up the top end mobile part from GTX 680 -> 880, but within a year or so I bet they can go quite a bit higher still.
Oh well, it was nice having a top of the line mobile GPU for a while LOL
If 28nm hit in 2012 though, doesn't that make 2015 its third year? At least 28nm seems to be a really good process, vs all the issues with 90/65nm, etc., since we're stuck on it so long.
Isn't this Moore's Law hitting the constraints of physical reality though? We're taking longer and longer to get to progressively smaller shrinks in die size, it seems like...
Oh well, 22nm's been great with Intel and 28's been great with everyone else!