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.

Comments

Meh

[Cedarbridge]

I don't really feel the need to drop $1k on a graphics card. Not when 95% of my needs can be met with an old Radeon 6850. Its not like I need to speed render the surface of Mars or anything.

Re:Meh

[FordenFreeman]

I use an r9 270. I bought it when my old card starting showing age and acting up. For about $150 it runs every game I play on highest settings without batting an eye. That's with an AMD Athlon x2 btw... The whole race to specs domination doesn't add much.

Re:Meh

[Shadow of Eternity]

Sticker shock was my reaction as well. My old HD5870 is only now starting to have unacceptably low performance in some of the games I play, and spending around $300 will probably keep me set for another 4-5 years easily.

Re:Meh

[PhrostyMcByte]

I use an r9 270. I bought it when my old card starting showing age and acting up. For about $150 it runs every game I play on highest settings without batting an eye. That's with an AMD Athlon x2 btw... The whole race to specs domination doesn't add much.

You aren't playing the same games I'm playing. My video card and CPU are considerably faster than yours, and I'm unable to max out my settings in most games without considerable FPS drops.

Re:Meh

[jones_supa]

heh, well a 270 wont do much. he is lying.

Huh? An R9 270 achieves a G3DMark of 4000. Hey, it's not the latest flagship Deluxe Gamerz ReaperJaws Anniversary Edition Moon Commander card, but still an extremely fast one. Should play even new games on quite high settings.

Re:Meh

[ArcadeMan]

320x240, why do you ask?

This isn't surprising

[rsilvergun]

AMD hasn't been able to offer serious competition in quite some time. Driver stability has been a nightmare for them (partially because of nVidia's shenanigans, but that hasn't made games any more stable...). The trouble is nVidia is in such a strong position they can just drop their pants and buy AMD. What I'm wondering is if they're making enough from the consoles to push back. I'm inclined to say no since nVidia turned that contract down...

Re:This isn't surprising

[im_thatoneguy]

ATI/AMD has had shit drivers since the 90s. This whole "Nvidia is stabbing us in the back!" doesn't carry water since they've *never* had reliable products.

Re:This isn't surprising

[Pubstar]

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.

Re:This isn't surprising

[arbiter1]

If AMD didn't screw over tessellation performance for opencl wouldn't be in such a spot but hey, Nvidia is USING a standard like AMD fanboyz all wanted.

Re:This isn't surprising

[ShanghaiBill]

What makes them attractive to bitcoin miners is they have less powerful cores but have many more of them.

Bitcoin mining moved to ASICs years ago. Mining on GPUs is not cost effective.

Re:This isn't surprising

[0123456]

When I worked on 3D drivers, oh, how we used to laugh when some idiot developer put in code that deliberately broke the game when run under a debugger. Yet they still expected it to work well on our cards...

But, yeah, it wasn't at all unusual for developers of little clue to do completely retarded things that worked on other hardware, but not ours. Often because we actually implemented the feature they were using in hardware, whereas the other drivers simulated it in software.

Re:This isn't surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Same performance different Memory Capacity

[Luckyo]

That's not how GPU memory management works. When you max out GPU's onboard RAM, GPU starts calling to shared system memory located in system RAM. This limits performance a lot since PCI-E throughput is about 1/10 of GDDR5 speed, but it most certainly is not zero.

Regardless, TitanX, unlike previous Titan series is crippled for compute to the point where Nvidia itself officially recommended previous Titan cards for it over TitanX. It was clearly aimed at gamers who have more money than sense, and now that they collected that money, they are releasing a more sensibly priced card for the same weight class.

Re:Same performance different Memory Capacity

[Scutter]

$650 is "sensibly priced" for a gaming card? That's almost double the cost of a current-gen console and you still have to buy the rest of the computer.

Re:It's summer-time, no need to heat your office!

[Nemyst]

I know Slashdot isn't really up to date on gaming, but I'll just drop a hint: if someone's looking at the 980Ti, they are NOT the target market for a 750Ti.

Re:Same performance different Memory Capacity

[Kjella]

$650 is "sensibly priced" for a gaming card? That's almost double the cost of a current-gen console and you still have to buy the rest of the computer.

And you're playing at most 1920x1080x60 Hz, from what I understand often less. This is the kind of card you want if you're looking for 2560x1440x144 Hz or 3840x2160x60 Hz gaming on say an Acer XB270HU or XB280HK, pushing at least 4x as many pixels. For games that only run at 30 fps or 720p/900p make that 6x-8x as many pixels. Sure, it's like comparing a soccer mom car to a $100k+ sports car, it's not "sensibly" priced. It has terrible MPG with a 250W power consumption. But when you put the pedal to the metal, it's seriously fast.

The Titan X was clearly a "because we're the fastest, charge double" card. I guess you're always looking at it from your point of view and saying the others are the insane ones, "Paying a $1000 for a graphics card? That's crazy, I'll settle for a $650 GTX 980 Ti". Next guy says "Paying $650 for a graphics card? That's crazy, it'll settle for a $199 GTX 960" and so on. Basically you spend relative to your interest and the amount of money you can comfortably spend. Don't go to a five star luxury resort if the budget says a hostel, but if you can afford the resort do it. YOLO and all that.

Not yet

[malx]

Despite advances, these figures show that FPS in 4K is still not ready for prime-time even on top-class cards.

When there are cards that can handle it, I'll think about upgrading my 1920x1200 monitor. Until then, I'll wait it out, and so can my aging graphics card.

Part of the problem is that at higher resolutions it becomes more important to use high graphics settings (high res textures, better lighting effects, further draw distance), not less. So if you're interested in 4K gaming, you'll want to do it with everything turned up to 11. The exception to this rule is anti-aliasing, which decreases in value the higher the resolution.

Re:Same performance different Memory Capacity

[PPalmgren]

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.

Re:Same performance different Memory Capacity

[HornWumpus]

How many years ago was the latest console designed?

You realize consoles aren't even competitive with high end graphics when they are brand new?

Build a ship with 3 or 4 hundred components and watch the frame rate crash in KSP.