Nvidia GTX 980Ti review: Excellent performance but demands a pretty penny

Nvidia had launched its GTX 980 last year, which was followed by the GTX TITAN X which has three times the video memory that was seen on the GTX 980. Targetted more at the high-end gaming and compute/professional audience, the GTX TITAN X costs double that of GTX 980. Clearly there was a gap between these two top end cards and as expected, Nvidia’s latest card, the GeForce GTX 980Ti tends to till the gap. It is second only to the TITAN X in terms of feature set. AMD has launched the Radeon R9 Fury X and Radeon R9 Fury, which are its top of the line cards at the moment. We will be testing them in the near future. For the moment, let us check out the GTX 980Ti. Build and Design  Nvidia flagship cards have kind of acquired a uniform design language. The GTX 980Ti like the GTX 980, GTX 780Ti, GTX TITAN and to an extent the GTX 690 before it, has stuck to the similar gray coloured design with slight variations. On a first glance, the designs look identical – the 65mm radial fan is the same, the flourescent green GeForce logo atop the card is the same, the gray/black sheath is the same. The card measures 10.5-inches in length. Under the gray metallic shroud, you have a black-coloured heat-sink though. Under the heat-sink, you have three heat-pipes that transfer heat from the GPU to the heat-sink. This is a departure from the vapour chambers used in the GTX 780Ti and GTX Titan.  The GTX 980Ti adds in a backplate to the card to protect the PCB on the rear side. In addition to this, Nvidia also allows you to unscrew the top of the back plate just behind the PCIe power ports. On the display front, you have 3x DisplayPort 1.2, 1x HDMI 2.0 port and 1x DVI port. As is evident, Nvidia is pushing people to adopt the 4K displays for their systems having the GTX 900 series cards. The HDMI 2.0 port also supports 4K at 60Hz. It requires just one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCIe power connectors. Features The Nvidia GTX 980Ti is based on the Maxwell architecture and just like the TITAN X, the GTX 980Ti too is based on the GM200 GPU. The GM200 on the 980Ti comes with two of the 24 streaming multiprocessors (seen on the TITAN X) disabled. So you have 22 SMMs giving you 2816 active CUDA cores. The other difference is that the GTX 980Ti comes with 6GB of VRAM which is half of that seen on the TITAN X.  The rest of the specs on the GTX 980Ti are similar to the TITAN X. For instance, both the cards have 8billion transistors, same core clock speed of 1000MHz and boost clock speed of 1075MHz, 384-bit memory bus width and a maximum TDP of 250W.  The GTX 980Ti supports DirectX 12. Also if the **Nvidia booth at Computex** is any indicator, the GTX 980Ti will also support high end games on VR headsets. Apart from this you have support for Nvidia’s features such as Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR), Multi-frame Anti-aliasing (MFAA), Voxel Global Illumination (VXGI), GameStream, G-sync and so on. With the DSR activated, the scenes will be rendered at a higher resolution and then will be scaled down to the native resolution of your display. Multi-frame Anti-aliasing (MFAA) is a feature exclusive to high end Nvidia cards, thanks to a hardware feature: programmable AA sample positions. It has been introduced to address the issue faced by graphically demanding games, which get a hit in frame rates when you increase the multi-sampling anti-aliasing (MSAA) to highest levels. The final result can deliver image quality approaching that of 8xAA at roughly the cost of 4xAA, or 4xAA quality at roughly the cost of 2xAA. With Voxel Global Illumination (VXGI), Nvidia allows a real time global illumination engine which assures realistic reflections. Test Setup Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K Motherboard: ASRock Z87M Extreme4 RAM: 2 x 4GB GSkill RipjawsX Drive: Intel SSD, 80GB (boot drive) Additional Drive: Western Digital Velociraptor, 150GB (secondary) PSU: Cooler Master 800W Silent Pro Gold OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Monitor: ASUS PB278Q Drivers: Nvidia 335.60 (for ZOTAC GTX 980Ti and Nvidia GTX 980Ti) (Other cards were tested on older drivers as we didn’t have it with us at the time) Performance 3DMark 11 3DMark is a computer benchmarking tool created and developed by Futuremark Corporation to determine the performance of a computer’s 3D graphic rendering and CPU workload processing capabilities. The latest version makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11, including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. We used the “Performance” preset for this benchmark.  3D Mark (Fire Strike Extreme) This is another synthetic benchmark from Futuremark. We test the card on the Fire Strike Extreme test as it is designed for the enthusiast-level graphics performance. It test the DirectX11 capabilities, using extreme tessellation and volumetric illumination along with smoke simulations which use compute shaders and dynamic particle illumination.  Metro: Last Light Metro: Last Light is a first-person shooter video game that continues Metro’s legacy of being one of the most demanding games for the best of GPUs. The game has a lot of DX11 eye-candy, which really puts a strain on any GPU. All DX11 features were enabled for the benchmark and we used the built-in benchmark for this test. PS: Some of the cards have not been tested on the 4K display, which we got last week, as we did not have those cards on hand. We will update the charts as soon as we get the cards.  Also for the sake of brevity in the charts, we have kept the name in the chart as ZOTAC GTX 980Ti AMP! (not to be confused with the actual card with that name).     Bioshock Infinite Bioshock Infinite developed by Irrational Games uses a modified version of the Unreal Engine. It’s a first-person shooter which takes place in a fictional floating city. We ran the benchmark using the Adrenaline Benchmark tool and used the Ultra and Medium settings. In the Ultra settings you have FXAA On, Ultra texture detail, 16x AF, Ultra dynamic shadows and with the Medium settings you have FXAA On, High texture detail, 8x AF and High dynamic shadows.    Tomb Raider Tomb Raider is a third-person shooter which is a reboot of the famous series with Lara Croft as the protagonist. In this reboot, she is ship-wrecked on a mysterious island which presents its own set of challenges which Lara has to overcome. The game is based on a customised CrystalEngine. It also features the AMD TressFX technology which adds more realism to hair rendering and physics. We ran the benchmark using the in-built benchmark tool at the Ultimate and Ultra settings. On the Ultimate preset, you have TressFX activated, 16x AF, FXAA whereas the Ultra preset has Normal hair quality, 16x AF, FXAA.    Sleeping Dogs Sleeping Dogs is an open-world third-person action-adventure game developed by United Front games and Square Enix London Studios. Set in modern-day Hong Kong the game involves you playing as Wei Shan, an undercover cop, who infiltrates a local Triad gang. We ran the benchmark using the Adrenaline Benchmark tool and used the Ultra and Medium settings.    The Witcher 3: Wild Hun****t The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is an open-world action role-playing game. The story revolves around the protagonist Geralt of Rivia who is on a journey through the lands of the Northern Kingdoms. It is based on the REDengine 3 game engine which is meant for non-linear RPGs. Since the game does not have its in-built benchmark we played a set saved game which involved couple of action scenes and riding on horseback through various terrains including through water. We used FRAPs to keep track of the frame rates. The graphics section also has a separate post processing section. We played using Ultra and Medium settings.    Temperatures We noted the temperature of all the participating cards at idle and load states. The fan speeds were kept on auto. We noted maximum load temperatures after running benchmarks such as FurMark at 1080p preset, 3D Mark 11, Battlefield 3 and Metro: Last Light and taking an average.  Power Consumption We used an energy monitoring device to measure the power consumed by the total rig with the graphics cards on them. The Cooler Master 800W PSU was plugged into the power meter which gave out the power consumed in Watts on the display. After powering on the system we let it stay unused for a good five minutes to get the idle power reading and then ran three instances of FurMark 1080p preset to get the maximum load power.  Verdict and Price in India The Nvidia GeForce GTX 980Ti comes out tops in most tests as far as single GPU cards go. Of course the price point of Rs 55,999 slots this card in the high end segment. Ideally those who already have or are planning to get a 4K monitor to play games at all settings maxed out, is the audience Nvidia is looking at. If you have a 1080p display, it is pointless to go for this card as it will not do justice to the performance the GTX 980Ti can offer. The load power and load temperature readings aren’t the best of the lot, but with a beast like the GTX 980Ti which gives a superior performance than other competing cards, that should be expected. The 6GB VRAM on the GTX 980Ti is more than enough to handle the taxing games. We will be testing the AMD Fury series cards soon to see how they perform against this card which is almost as good as the flagship TITAN X.