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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kyuu - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Witcher 3 runs just fine on my single 290. Is it just the xfire profile? Do you have the new driver and latest patches? Also, have you turned down tesselation or turned off hairworks?PEJUman - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
4K... was hoping my U28D590D will have freesync, but alas... no such luck. I am very sensitive to stutter, it gives me motion sickness, to the point I have to stop playing :(limiting hairworks to 8x does help, but I really dislike the hair without it. I rather wait for 15.5.1 or 15.6. I have other games to keep me busy for a while.
I can get 45 avg if I drop to 21:9 ratio using 2840 x 1646, but even then I still get motion sickness from the occasional drops.
chizow - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Yes CrossFire support of TW3 is broken from Day1, its a well-known issue. AMD hastily released a driver last week with a CF profile, but its virtually unusable as it introduces a number of other issues with AA and flickering icons.PEJUman - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
15.5 no longer flickers with or without AA. still slow though.chizow - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Are you sure? Did they release a follow-up to the 15.5 Beta? Because the notes and independent user feedback stated there was still flickering:*The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - To enable the best performance and experience in Crossfire, users must disable Anti-Aliasing from the games video-post processing options. Some random flickering may occur when using Crossfire. If the issue is affecting the game experience, as a work around we suggest disabling Crossfire while we continue to work with CD Projekt Red to resolve this issue
Peichen - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
295X2 is indeed faster but it also uses twice as much power. You have to take the 1000W PSU into account as well as one or two additional 120mm fans that's needed to get the heat out the case. When you add up all the extra cost for PSU, fans, electricity, noise and stutter against an overclocked 980Ti (last few pages of review), the slight speed advantage aren't going to be worth it.Also, Maxwell 2 supports DirectX 12, I am not so sure about any of the current AMD/ATI cards since they were designed in 2013.
xthetenth - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
You don't have to buy a new PSU every time you buy a high TDP card, but otherwise a valid point. Going multi-GPU for the same performance requires a much bigger price difference to be worth it vs. a single card.Kutark - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Basically you're gonna spend an extra $5/mo on electricity with that card, or $60/yr vs a 980ti. thats actually pretty huge. Thats at 4hrs/day of gaming, at an average of 12c/kwh. If you game 6 or 7 hours a day, its even worse.These high power cards are a little ridiculous. 600w just for one video card?!!
Daroller - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
I had a GTX690, and I run SLI TITAN X. Dual GPU IS a hindrance. You'd have to be blind, stupid, or a rabid fanboy to claim otherwise. The 295x2 isn't exempt from that just because you dislike NV and harbor a not so secret love for AMD.Daroller - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
I had a GTX690, and I run SLI TITAN X. Dual GPU IS a hindrance. You'd have to be blind, stupid, or a rabid fanboy to claim otherwise. The 295x2 isn't exempt from that just because you dislike NV and harbor a not so secret love for AMD.