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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madwolfa - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
No, it has full access.MapRef41N93W - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
It has the full ROPs. The memory is tied to the ROPs which is why the 970 had it's issue.RaistlinZ - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
Ryan, did you guys fully test the amount of full-speed VRAM on this 980Ti? Is all 6GB running at full speed and not just 5.5GB or some such nonesense? Have you tested actual in game VRAM usage and seen it reach 6GB? Thanks. :)madwolfa - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/206956-nvidia-g... confirmed by nvidia that full memory access is availableo-k - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
that's what they said last time.FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - link
No they didn't say anything and 6 months later...This time they said something beforehand, I'm sure they are lying, so I agree with you.
My tinfoil is failing one moment I'm receiving a transmission from beta reticuli.
Ah yes, it's confirmed, nVidia is lying, again, the memory is hosed on the 980ti...
This message will self destruct in 5 seconds wether or not you've accepted the mission o-k.
Ryan Smith - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
Yep. We've checked."Just to be sure we checked to make sure the ROP/MC configuration of GTX 980 Ti was unchanged at 96 ROPs"
None of the ROP/MC partitions have been disabled, and all 3MB of L2 cache is available.
jjj - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
Makes the 980 a very hard sell even at 499$, they should have dropped it to 449$ or even slightly less. The TI is so much faster and the 970 is so much cheaper.Yojimbo - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
I think it should have been dropped to $250, but that's just me. When price premiums are not linear with performance increases, people complain the higher priced card is overpriced, and when they are, people complain the lower priced card is overpriced. Best solution: All cards $0.jjj - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
I wasn't complaining, i was commenting on their strategy and your childish comment is just inappropriate.