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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xenol - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Transistor count means nothing. The GTX 780 Ti has 2.8 billion transistors. The GTX 980 has around 2 billion transistors, and yet the GTX 980 can dance with the GTX 780 Ti in performance.As the saying goes... it's not the size that matters, only how you use it.
Niabureth - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Don't want to sound like a messer schmitt but thats 2,8K cuda cores for GK110, and 2K for the GM204. The GK110 has 7.1 billion transistors.jman9295 - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
In this very article they list the transistor count of those two cards in a giant graph. The 980 has 5.2 billion transistors and the 780ti 7.1 billion. Still, your point is the same, they got more performance out of less transistors on the same manufacturing node. All 28nm means is how small the gap is between identical components, in this case the CUDA cores. Each Maxwell CUDA is clearly more efficient than each Kepler. Also helping is the double VRAM size which probably allowed them to also double the ROP count which greatly improved transistor efficiency and performance.Mithan - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
It matters because we are close to .16/20nm GPU's, which will destroy these.dragonsqrrl - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
"we are close to .16/20nm GPU's"People said the same thing when the 750Ti launched. I'll give give you one thing, we are closer than we were, but we are not "close".
Kevin G - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
The difference now is that there are actually 20 nm products on the market today, just none of them are GPUs. It seems that without FinFET, 20 nm looks to be optimal only for mobile.felicityc - Tuesday, January 11, 2022 - link
What if I told you we are on 8nm now?LemmingOverlord - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
@SirMaster - The reason people care about the process node is because that right now - in mid-2015 - this is an extremely mature (ie: old but well-rehearsed) manufacturing process, which has gone through several iterations and can now yield much better results (literally) than the original 28nm process. This means that it's much cheaper to produce because there are less defective parts per wafer (ie: higher yield). Hence ComputerGuy2006 saying what he said.Contrary to what other people say "smaller nm" does NOT imply higher performance. Basically when a shrink comes along you can expect manufacturers to do 1 of two things:
a) higher transistor count in a similar die size, with similar power characteristics when compared to its ancestor - and therefore higher performance
b) same transistor count in a much smaller die size, therefore better thermals/power characteristics
Neither of these factor in architectural enhancements (which sometimes are not that transparent, due to their immaturity).
So ComputerGuy2006 is absolutely right. Nvidia will make a killing on a very mature process which costs them a below-average amount of money to manufacture.
In this case Nvidia is using "defective" Titan X chips to manufacture 980 Ti. Simple as that. Their Titan X leftovers sell for $350 less and you still get almost all the performance a Titan would give you.
royalcrown - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link
I take issue with point b) " same transistor count in a much smaller die size, therefore better thermals/power characteristics"I disagree because the same die shrink can also cause a rise in power density, therefore WORSE characteristics (especially thermals).
Gasaraki88 - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Smaller nm, bigger e-peen.