The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Review
by Ryan Smith on May 31, 2015 6:00 PM ESTGRID Autosport
For the racing game in our benchmark suite we have Codemasters’ GRID Autosport. Codemasters continues to set the bar for graphical fidelity in racing games, delivering realistic looking environments with layed with additional graphical effects. Based on their in-house EGO engine, GRID Autosport includes a DirectCompute based advanced lighting system in its highest quality settings, which incurs a significant performance penalty on lower-end cards but does a good job of emulating more realistic lighting within the game world.
As was the case with all of our other games so far, our racing benchmark of choice does no better in separating the two GM200 cards, with GTX 980 Ti yet again trailing GTX Titan X by no more than 3%. Even with everything cranked up to max, the GTX 980 Ti makes easy work of GRID at 4K, hitting 70.6fps at 4K Ultra and making it the cheapest card to crack 60fps. This also continues to be a solid lead for the GTX 980 Ti over the GTX 980 and GTX 780, beating the two cards by 28% and 76% respectively at 4K.
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Klimax - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Just small bug in your article:Page "GRID Autosport" has one paragraph from previous page.
"Switching out to another strategy game, even given Attila’s significant GPU requirements at higher settings, GTX 980 Ti still doesn’t falter. It trails GTX Titan X by just 2% at all settings."
As for theoretical pixel test with anomalous 15% drop from Titan X, there is ready explanation:
Under specific conditions there won't be enough power to push those two Raster engines with cut down blocks. (also only three paths instead of four)
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link
Fixed. Thanks for pointing that out.bdiddytampa - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Really great and thorough review as usual :-) Thanks Ryan!Hrobertgar - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Today, Alienware is offering 15" laptops with an option for an R9-390x. Their spec sheet isn't updated, nor could I find updated specs for anything other than R9-370 on AMD's own website. Are you going to review some of these R9-300 series cards anytime soon?Hrobertgar - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
When I went to checkout (didn't actually buy - just checking schedule) it indicated 6-8 day shipping with the R9-390X.3DJF - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Ummm....$599 for R9 295X2?......where exactly? every search i have done for that card over the last 4 months up to today shows a LOWEST price of $619.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link
It is currently $599 after rebate over at Newegg.Casecutter - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
From most result the 980Ti offer 20% more @1440p than a 980 (GM204) and given the 980Ti cost like 18-19% more that the orginal MSRP of the 980 ($550) It's really not any big thing.Given GM200 a 38% larger die, and 38% more SU's over a GM204 and you get 20% increase? It worse when a full TitanX is considered, that has 50% more SU's and the TitanX get perhaps 4% more in FpS over the 980Ti. This points to the fact that Maxwell doesn't scale. Looking at power the 980Ti is needing approx. 28% more power, which is not the worst but is starting to indicate there a losses as Nvidia scaled it up.
chizow - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Well, I guess its a good thing 980Ti isn't just 20% faster than the 980 then lol.CiccioB - Thursday, June 4, 2015 - link
This is obviously a comment by a frustrated AMD fan.Maxwell scales perfectly as you didn't consider the frequency it runs.
GM200 is 50% more than a GM204 in all resources. But those GPU run at about 0.86% of GM204 frequency (1250 vs 1075). If you can do simple math, you'll see that for any 980 results, if you multiply it by 1.5 and then for 0.86 (or directly for 1.3, that means 30% more) you'll find almost exactly the numbers the 980Ti bench shows.
Now that the new 980 $500 price, do the same and... yes, it is $650 for 980Ti.
Oh, the die size... let's see... 398mm^2of GM204 * 1.5 = 597mm^2 which compares almost exactly with the calculated 601m^2 of GM200.
Pretty simply. It shows everything scales perfectly in nvidia house. Seen custom cards are coming, we'll see GM200 going to 50% more than GM204 at same frequency. Yet these cards will consume a bit more, as expected.
You cannot say the same for AMD architecture though, as with smaller chips GCN is somewhat on par or even better with respect to nvidia for perf/mm^2, but as soon as real crunching power is requested GCN becomes extremely inefficient under the point of both perf/Watt or perf/mm^2.
If you tried to plant a doubt about the quality of this GM200 or Maxwell architecture in general, sorry, you choose the wrong architecture/chip/method. You simply failed.