NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 and 980 Reviews

[Arthur]

The GTX 980 is faster than the GTX 780 Ti and cheaper too (~£429 in the UK). The GTX 970 is expected to cost around £250.

 

Reviews: AnandTech, Bit-tech, Kit-Guru, HardOCP, Hexus, Tech Powerup, Tech Report (970 & 980), TechSpot (970 & 980)

 

The GTX 980 is faster, less power hungry, and quieter than the Radeon R9 290X, so once again NVIDIA has landed the technical trifecta. Even if we’re just looking at performance and pricing the GTX 980 is the undisputed holder of the single-GPU performance crown, besting everything else AMD and NVIDIA have to offer, and offering it at a price that is by no means a steal, is more than reasonable given NVIDIA’s technical and performance advantage. As such GTX 980 comes very, very close to doing to Radeon R9 290X what GTX 680 did to Radeon HD 7970 over 2 years ago.

 

Meanwhile from a feature perspective the GTX 900 series is going to prove to be very captivating product. Dynamic Super Resolution is a brutish-yet-clever solution of what to do about anti-aliasing on todays deferred renderer games that cannot support traditional MSAA/SSAA, and while I’m withholding my judgment on Multi-Frame sampled Anti-Aliasing until it’s made available to users in NVIDIA’s drivers, the idea at least has merit. Otherwise I am very happy to see that NVIDIA has now fully caught up to the competition in terms of baseline API features by offering everything needed to support Direct3D 11.2 and beyond.

 

Nvidia's introduction of the GTX 980 and GTX 970 graphics cards redefines the high-end GeForce positioning for the next few months. Based on the premise that energy efficiency and die space are just as important as in-game frames per second, the new GPUs serve to replace existing Kepler parts - GeForce GTX 770, GTX 780 and GTX 780 Ti - rather than extend the single-GPU performance lead.

 

The GeForce GTX 980 represents a small performance leap over the GTX 780 Ti and a more pronounced one above the Radeon R9 290X. Owners of those types of cards shouldn't be distressed by the new 9-series GPU, but it's clearly a better solution no matter how you dice it up. Users coming from older cards, such as the GeForce GTX 680 or Radeon HD 6970, should view the GTX 980 in a different light; it's the best single-GPU card in almost any metric we care to evaluate it against.

 

 

 

Edited September 19, 2014 by Arthur

[Arthur]

DL-DVI, HDMI 2.0 (4K@60Hz) and 3 x DisplayPort!

 

 

We’ll start first with display I/O. HDMI users will be happy to see that as of GM204, NVIDIA now supports HDMI 2.0, which will allow NVIDIA to drive future 4K@60Hz displays over HDMI and without compromise. HDMI 2.0 for its part is the 4K-focused upgrade of the HDMI standard, and brings with it support for the much higher data rate (through a greatly increased clockspeed of 600MHz) necessary to drive 4K displays at 60Hz, while also introducing features such as new subsampling patterns like YCbCr 4:2:0, and official support for wide aspect ratio (21:9 displays).

 

It should be noted that this is full HDMI 2.0 support, and as a result it notably differs from the earlier support that NVIDIA patched into Kepler and Maxwell 1 through drivers. Whereas NVIDIA’s earlier update was to allow these products to drive a 4K@60Hz display using 4:2:0 subsampling to stay within the bandwidth limitations of HDMI 1.4, Maxwell 2 implements the bandwidth improvements necessary to support 4K@60Hz with full resolution 4:4:4 and RGB color spaces.

 

Meanwhile alongside the upgrade to HDMI 2.0, NVIDIA has also made one other change to their display controllers that should be of interest to multi-monitor users. With Maxwell 2, a single display controller can now drive multiple identical MST substreams on its own, rather than requiring a different display controller for each stream. This feature will be especially useful for driving tiled monitors such as many of today’s 4K monitors, which are internally a pair of identical displays driven using MST. By being able to drive both tiles off of a single display controller, NVIDIA can make better use of their 4 display controllers, allowing them to drive up to 4 such displays off of a Maxwell 2 GPU as opposed to the 2 display limitation that is inherent to Kepler GPUs. For the consumer cards we’re seeing today, the most common display I/O configuration will include 3 DisplayPorts, allowing these specific cards to drive up to 3 such 4K monitors.

 

Surprisingly, even after only 7 months since the first Maxwell 1 GPUs, NVIDIA has once again overhauled NVENC, and this time more significantly. The Maxwell 2 version of NVENC further builds off of the Maxwell 1 NVENC by adding full support for HEVC (H.265) encoding. Like HDMI 2.0 support, this marks the very first PC GPU we’ve seen integrate support for this more advanced codec.

[featured_spectre]

I quite like the look of this card. Might not be quite as powerful as the 295x2, but still a decent card and its a reasonable price for what you get.

[mac_shinobi]

I quite like the look of this card. Might not be quite as powerful as the 295x2, but still a decent card and its a reasonable price for what you get.

 

Two R9 295x2 from OCuk @ £720 per card = £1440 for two of these in quad cross fire. Still agree ref what you said ^^^

 

Gigabyte AMD Radeon 295 X2 Dual GPU 8192MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card [GV-R9295X2-8GD-B]

[sonofsanta]

tl:dr; 980 comes top of all the charts.

 

295X2 isn't really comparable as it's a dual-chip solution, with all the awkwardness that entails (CrossFire profiles, enormous heat & noise & power, micro-stuttering...). Having done CrossFire before, I am now firmly and forever in the "one decent GPU, as powerful as you can get" camp.

 

Not worth upgrading from my 680 for this, but if this is only the GM204 chip, GM210 will be a monster

[featured_spectre]

I'm quite happy with my 770, and will be for a long time...thinking a good 3-5 years depending on how much things change.

[mac_shinobi]

I'm quite happy with my 770, and will be for a long time...thinking a good 3-5 years depending on how much things change.

 

I've still yet to build my pc , got a GTX 760. Only doing 1080P , meant to be good enough for 60 fps but looking at the graphs etc shows about 40 fps

[featured_spectre]

60fps is under ideal load...

[Fleetwood]

This makes my GTX 680 feel ancient this looks like a lovely card though, and the GTX 970 for only £250? That seems bizarrely cheap! Edited September 19, 2014 by Fleetwood

[abillybob]

I have the 770 swell in my rig, play's everything really well. I'll only change the GPU when 4K resolution become the norm.

[mac_shinobi]

Not too shabby : ASUS GeForce GTX 760 DirectCU II OC review - Overclocking the graphics card

[madurham]

It's not really worth an upgrade from a 780Ti, maybe a 780 depending on how flush you are. But a card with the same performance of a 780Ti, cheaper, uses 75W less and overclocks really well is incredible.

 

I just bought a 980 to replace my 560. Little bit of an improvement.

[Sunnyknight]

Minor difference compared to the 780ti.

 

Don't think i'll upgrade.

 

That Radeon is insane, but for that price too, i'd just tri sli lol.

 

Nice bit of kit from Nvidia, but no need to bring it out in my opinion. They still rein kings with the Titan Z

[mac_shinobi]

Minor difference compared to the 780ti.

 

Don't think i'll upgrade.

 

That Radeon is insane, but for that price too, i'd just tri sli lol.

 

Nice bit of kit from Nvidia, but no need to bring it out in my opinion. They still rein kings with the Titan Z

 

AMD is Cross Fire and Nvidia is SLI

 

Can you do a three way cross fire with three R9 295x2 GPU's ??

 

You could do that with the X99 system you are building @Sunnyknight with that 5960x and 32gb of DDR4 RAM and maybe some SSD's like the Samsung 850 Pro in raid 0 to be on the safe side eh ? lol