14 DAY TRIAL // After months of skirting around the issue, NVIDIA has finally allowed the technical details of the GeForce GTX 980 video board to reach the Internet. We're happy to tell you that we have them all, right here, along with some photos.
Graphics cards are serious business, especially on the high end segment, where performance easily eclipses price concerns. Not that NVIDIA is aiming for any truly big price tag, unlike it did with the GTX Titan Z dual-GPU (three thousand dollars/euro).
The price of the GeForce GTX 980 hasn't been confirmed, but it is said to be of around $599 / €599. We'll only know for sure tomorrow (September 19) or maybe next week if the release doesn't happen as expected.
Considering that the GeForce GTX 970 is said to cost $330 / €330, the price of $599 / €599 sounds a bit high, what with the GM204-400 GPU having only 384 more CUDA cores than the GM204-200 in the GTX 970. We'll reserve judgment though.
The GeForce GTX 980 specs
To start off, the GM204 is a different beast from the GM107 in the GTX 750 (Ti). Even though it's still built on 28nm, it is in a completely different league, as promised. The GPU has 16 Streaming Maxwell Multiprocessors (SMMs), 64 ROPs (more than the 48 in GK110 Kepler, GTX 780 Ti), and 128 texture mapping units (TMUs). The CUDA core count is 2,048.
All in all, the newcomer has a memory bandwidth of 224 GB/s, no better than GTX 770. The new board compensates for it, however, thanks to higher clocks, 1,126 MHz base, and 1,216 MHz boost.
The GPU also has some new technological features, like Multi-Pixel Programmable Sampling, which improves sample randomization and reduces quantization artifacts, giving the impression of a larger number of colors.
Dynamic Super Resolution is also present (upscaling technology that brings “4K quality on a 1080p display”), as is Third Generation Delta Color Compression (increases memory efficiency, so that the 256-bit interface isn't restrictive).
Amazing power efficiency
This is one of the bigger surprises. The high-end video card has a TDP (thermal design power) of only 165W, which is very low compared to the GTX 770's 230W and GTX 780 Ti's 250W.
Thus, running your computer at full power all the time will cost you less than before by a significant amount (no painful power bills for you, especially if you get other efficient hardware, like SSDs). So you can sit back and enjoy HDMI 2.0 / DVI / 3x DisplayPort films and gaming all day long (or night long, if you're that kind of person).
Future Maxwell-based cards
We may see a GTX 980 Ti at some point in the future, especially since the bandwidth of the 980 is the same as that of the Kepler GTX 770, not GTX 780 Ti. The GTX 970 will debut before it, though.
