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NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 980 Ti Costs $350 Less Than TITAN X, Performs Similarly
Deathspawner writes: In advance of the rumored pending launch of AMD's next-generation Radeon graphics cards, NVIDIA has decided to pull no punches and release a seriously tempting GTX 980 Ti at $649. It's tempting both because the extra $150 it costs over the GTX 980 more than makes up for it in performance gained, and despite it coming really close to the performance of TITAN X, it costs $350 less. AMD's job might just have become a bit harder. Vigile adds The GTX 980 Ti has 6GB of memory (versus 12GB for the GTX Titan X) but PC Perspective's review shows no negative side effects of the drop. This implementation of the GM200 GPU uses 2,816 CUDA cores rather than the 3,072 cores of the Titan X, but thanks to higher average Boost clocks, performance between the two cards is identical. And at Hot Hardware, another equally positive, benchmark-laden review.
Funny, I've had zero problems with my drivers form AMD cards for the past 5-6 years. Of course, prior to that, it was a nightmare. Also, go look up GameWorks. It actively fucks AMD in that they cant optimize anything that runs GameWorks.
We just finished a project with a high-end ATI/AMD R9 290X so we could use their EyeFinity tech to make a single desktop span over multiple monitors and be adjusted for bezels etc.
While the card itself runs very fast and it finally worked as intended, the Catalyst Control Center (CCC) is an absolute joke. It's embarrassingly bad, some of the settings make almost no sense, the bezel adjustment is totally broken (on the latest stable drivers) to the point where the on-screen display during setup is meaningless and forget about editing any settings you just set up. You have to retry and retry until you finally get what you want. It saves the EyeFinity setups each time in a configuration you can name, but then you can't find it anywhere, edit it, copy it to other machines, etc. so what's the point? If you further adjust the bezels it's a total stab in the dark as to which way the screens will move using the arrow buttons. Total crap. If you know you want say 14px between each monitor you might expect to be able to enter this somewhere. No, wrong. It's all set up by eye, but that's broken. Their forums are littered with complaints about this sort of thing but there are no answers anywhere.
Even getting a straight answer about what monitor connections will allow the EyeFinity tech to work is a nightmare. Various vendors claim different things, but ultimately no-one we talked to knew if it would work or not without just hooking it all up. Pretty bad documentation on their site and vendor sites, just shiny logos and a few buzzwords and you're expected to trust them and hope it works. There are too many bulletpoints with multiple asterisks and fineprint attached about all these great sounding features that just don't work in all manner of fairly common-sounding use cases.
Who the hell writes this stuff? Who the hell tests this stuff? I can only assume they all use nVidia cards internally because it's so bad they can't possibly be looking at or using it.
nVidia should be crushing ATI/AMD given the state of their hardware and software.
All outputs are not created equal. First, most consoles target 30 FPS. Second, like the old consoles at 1080p, this output is likely just an upscale. They simply do not have the horsepower to render content at that resolution. Equivalent GPUs can be had for $100 or less in computers.