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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PEJUman - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
I agree, the fact that AMD new 3xx is mostly (sans 1 new GPU) rebrands scares the crap out of me. and Nvidia knows it too, that's why we're getting the bad witcher 3 on gameworks @ kepler, astronomical prices and a generally very 'apple like marketing' from nvidia.Don't get me wrong, I certainly appreciate the level of refinements that Nvidia brings to the table, but without any answer from AMD, prices are very far from reasonable.
few years ago, I would never guessed PC gaming will be dead due to single GPU supplier situation, nowadays I am a lot more unsure...
Yojimbo - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
In that case why assume that the 980 should have been dropped in price more. Maybe the 980 Ti should have been priced at $700?The difference between $500 and $650 is palpable. And the performance one requires depends on the monitor one has. What you seem to be saying is you would be willing to pay more than 30% price premium for a 30% increase in performance, which is usual. But when prices are actually set that way, there always seem to be people complaining the premium card is priced too high, and quoting the price/performance difference as the reason.
chizow - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
@Yojimbo lol so true, people seem to think price:perf should be perfectly linear and comparable to some bargain bin part at $75, but if that was always the case, we'd all be using 2-3 gen old cards that can't play the games we want to play, today.dragonsqrrl - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
The 980 is $550, not $499. Despite that it still has a similar price/performance ratio to the 980 Ti. So technically it's no worse of a deal than the 980 Ti, but I think the 980 should still drop in price to ~$500 or $450. It should have a better price/performance ratio than the higher-end Ti.jjj - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
The 980 price has been dropped to 499$ and the point was that the TI and the 970 are much better buys, the 870 being way cheaper for little perf loss while the TI offers a lot more perf and is far better at 4k.dragonsqrrl - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
Ahh, sorry I missed that. However, at $500 the 980 still has a similar price/performance ratio as the 980 Ti. So while I do think it should drop by more, I'm also a bit confused by why people are calling it a terrible buy when it really isn't anymore terrible than the Ti at $650.just4U - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
(...sigh) $740 here in Canada.dragonsqrrl - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
:(o-k - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
could you please make sure this time that the ram is 384-Bit, 6GB total @ 7GHz GDDR5. Please double check.D. Lister - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
No, drop everything in your life AT staff, and effing TRIPLE check, and make sure to provide a notarized video of the process. Anything, ANYTHING at all, that can wash away the salt of the AMD rebadge, C'MOOOOON!