A Titan X with a fancy haircut and convincing specs

Jun 5, 2015 08:31 GMT  ·  By

Nvidia always thinks practical, and in terms of “wow-factor,” the company never fails to deliver; but when it comes to ordinary people and basement-dwelling laymen, they rarely get to enjoy first-hand and right-after-launch incredible machines Nvidia puts on the market, considering the hefty prices their top-end graphic cards come with when they are fresh.

This was also the case with Nvidia’s latest flagship card, the Titan X, a proper 12GB GDDR5 monster that costs a whopping $1200, giving people double thoughts about how much one should pay for this much firepower.

But graphical firepower does come for some serious coin, and to make sure people will still tap into the pure awesomeness the new GM200 GPU can provide, Nvidia decided that mortals should have a go and sip from this divine cup of force in the trimmed-down version of the Titan: Welcome Nvidia GTX 980Ti

Boasting the same GM200 GPU, the same 336.6 GBps memory bandwidth, same 384-bit, it’s only when it comes to overall physical memory, texture units and shader numbers that the lower price, almost half of that of Titan X, will be justified. Trimmed of 6GB of memory and having 2816 shaders instead of Titan’s 3072, it’s clear where your money will go, or not, when considering to update your system. However, if you’re thinking to invest in a 4K gaming system, this budget performance haircut on the GTX 980 Ti will pose a serious problem, as our benchmarks will show.

Looking at both Titan X and GTX 980 Ti PCB layout, we can see where the trimmings took place. Right on the back of the card, we can immediately notice the lack of the extra 12x512M ICs that the Titan carries.

GTX 980 Ti vs Titan X
GTX 980 Ti vs Titan X

Moreover, we can notice a plate sitting atop the PCB cooling a number of the surface-mounted components. Above it, we’ll notice the aluminum heat sink and the copper vapor chamber. The typical Nvidia centrifugal fan that blows air from the chassis into the heat-sink straight on your PCB is wrapped in sleek aluminum grey case which, according to Nvidia, can be removed for future modifications if needed.

On the back, we can notice one dual-link DVI port, one HDMI 2.0-capable connector and three DisplayPort interfaces built for multiple 4K displays. DisplayPorts appear to gain popularity among Nvidia users because of the growing number of 4K displays available on the market. The move from steadily dropping DVI to more and more DPs and HDMI 2.0 ports can be noticed by Nvidia’s development progress.

When it comes to power supply, the card is fed through its PCIe slot, one six-pin auxiliary connector and one eight-pin lead. All these combined will give the GTX 980 Ti 150W of power.

Testcase description

We’ve tested the new card with 3DMark Advanced benchmarking software, Battlefield 4 and Witcher 3 using Nvidia’s latest hotfix driver 353.12. This latest hotfix is not recognized in 3DMark yet, and a false warning will appear as “not being approved.”  

OS Windows 7 Professional 64-bit SP1
CPU Intel Core i7 3820 @ 3.60GHz Sandy Bridge-E 32nm Technology
RAM Kingston Hyper X  8.00GB DDR3 @ 667MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. RAMPAGE IV EXTREME (LGA2011)
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB GDDR5 (NVIDIA)
Monitor DELL P2311H (1920x1080@60Hz)
Storage 111GB ATA KINGSTON SH100S3 SCSI Disk Device (SSD)
465GB ATA WDC WD5001AALS-0 SCSI Disk Device (SATA)

Although we must admit that it might not be the latest rocket-boosted testbench, the CPU and memory was enough to give us optimal FPS in Battlefield 4 and Witcher 3 in Ultra settings, with more details following later.

However, it’s the 3D Mark tests that stressed the card to its limits, especially the Fire Strike 4K version that requires dual GTX 980s or Titan Xs in SLI with the latest i7-4790k overclocked as standard. As 3D Mark will force 4K resolutions on our 980 Ti, even though our monitor couldn’t support it, we could see the massive bottleneck an i7 only two years old can create when rendering 4K resolutions.

3D Mark Advanced

3D Mark High Performance PC test: The mildest and most forgiving test from 3D Mark for any respectable PC performance graphic card. It stresses the shaders, physics and resolution separately and then all combined. All in full 1080p resolution. At the end of the test, the GTX 980Ti got a 12478 grading which is better than 95% of most graphics cards tested. Promising start!

On the Run Details view, we can see that in the first graphics test it held a steady 70+ FPS with episodic bounces above 80 FPS while the temperature remained steady.

Going ahead to the second test, we can see it starting with the same high 80s FPS, and then, when the combat demo became more intense, we can see the FPS going into the lower 60s. Temperature, however, remained also at a steady 80 degrees Celsius.

Yet, the Physics tests brought the 980Ti under more stress, keeping it in the low 40s FPS rate while the temperature lowered slightly as the CPU bottleneck starts to make its mark.

Lastly, we can see the combined test. Physics and shaders will be thrown in together in the melting pot putting the card to as much stress as possible.

GTX 980Ti - High Performance Results
GTX 980Ti - High Performance Results

3D Mark Extreme Test: A more demanding test, it raises the rendered resolution to 2560 x 1440, increasing the tessellation volume and dynamic particle illumination. The Physics test runs 32 parallel simulations of soft and rigid body physics on the CPU.

As we can see, the score lowers a bit to 6963, and our system becomes better than 77% of tested systems.

The run details screen will show us a positive graphics test chart, keeping the FPS on the upper 60s and barely touching the 80s, the GPU temperature keeps rising slightly during the test.

The Graphics test 2 that will increase the dynamic particle illumination and shader processing starts with a respectable 40 FPS rate; still, it gets lower the more effects are being added in the demo, going as low as 27 FPS. Temperature, again, keeps a steady 80 degrees with only a slight increase.

Nonetheless, physics and combined tests will see the framerate plummet as usual going as low as 29 FPS in the Physics test and 16 FPS in the Combined stress. Evidently, the higher the resolution, the more demanding the shaders will get, and combine that with physics and tessellation, we get to put some serious stress on our 980Ti.

GTX 980Ti - Extreme Results
GTX 980Ti - Extreme Results

3D Mark Ultra Test:

The most demanding of 3D Mark tests, that our rig was simply not prepared to handle, will boost the graphical stress to 4K resolutions. At least 3 GB of video memory is required to start the Ultra test by default, but it seems this was not enough to reach FPS rates higher than 30 at 3840 x 2160 resolution.

As we can see from the results screen, the score was only 3779, being better than only 63% of all tested systems. It didn’t even count our rig as being a 4K gaming PC. Dropping down the 4K gaming PC tab will show us what typical 4K gaming rigs look like. They come with dual GTX 980 GPUs and the latest Haswell K-series CPUs from Intel. True monsters.

In our 4K tests, things kick up quite “optimistic” as the framerate kept a steady 20 FPS in the first graphics test while the GPU temperature behave like the early tests, only going slightly towards the 90 degrees Celsius. When new shaders are being added in the second graphics test, the framerate drops to 13 FPS, our system starting to reach the final limits of its processing power. With our i7 bottlenecking and with limited shaders and memory, all combined managed to stop the rendering process from reaching higher FPS rates typical of any standard 4K gaming system. However, it is to be expected, as 4K gaming needs high-end graphics cards in SLI or Crossfire.

Surprisingly, the physics test ended up with an average 30 FPS as the power of the GM 200 GPU shared shared also by Titan X shows its brute force, but when shaders and physics tests finally combine at 4K resolution, it all crumbles to a mere 9 FPS framerate.

GTX 980Ti - 4k Ultra Results
GTX 980Ti - 4k Ultra Results

It’s clear that despite being an extremely potent graphics card, being sold as Titan X’s smaller brother, one single 980Ti will not be enough to satisfy your 4K gaming needs, and probably the same thing can be said about the Titan itself. But when paired in SLI, the raw power, memory availability and shader number will open the 4K gaming universe for anyone who has the money to make such an investment.

For pragmatic wallets, the new 980Ti will be a more than perfect investment.

Since 4K gaming is still a thing of the near future and present games do not need, for practical reasons of course, a mandatory dual high-end graphic cards layout, the GTX 980 Ti can easily run the latest games in Ultra settings in 1080p resolution, as we’ll show you now.

Battlefield 4

The follow-up to Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4 is a multiplayer, military-oriented, first-person shooter that combines character customization and progressive level-up, multiplayer achievements and non-stop action in an alternate near-future. In our Battlefield 4 review, we showed how the player gets in the role of a special forces operative uncovering secret plots while preventing a coup d'état in modern day China.

We tested the game in Ultra settings 1080p resolution with HBAO (Horizont Based Ambient Occlusion) activated, 4x MSAA and V-Sync off for full FPS potential. Framerates were kept at a steady 100+ FPS with no problem even during moments of frantic shooting.

However, framerate will start to drop to 30 FPS if we amp up the supersampling by doubling the resolution scale from 100% to 200%.

Battlefield 4: Resolution scale 100% vs 200%
Battlefield 4: Resolution scale 100% vs 200%

When playing on 1920 x 1080, Ultra settings and 4 x MSAA, the extra supersampling will not be noticed, but it will actually raise the resolution to 2880x1620 internally, and it will output to your monitor at 1080p delivering a much better image and negating the need for running MSAA/post-AA. It’s a good tradeoff if one needs better quality for higher resolution screens. But the resources needed also get higher, much higher. We tested it in fullscreen and windowed mode, and while in fullscreen video resources went to nearly 2GB of used memory, in windowed mode it consumed nearly 2.6 GB.

Working with the latest hot-fix driver, GPU Monitor doesn’t fully see Shader and GPU clock speeds, but the general info is there.

As previously demonstrated by 3D Mark, when the internal resolution exceeds 1080p, framerates begin to drop drastically especially when playing on Ultra settings. Disabling MSAA will not help as supersampling will charge your memory and strain your GPU much more than antialiasing.

Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The third and probably the last entry in the Witcher series developed by Polish studio CD Projekt RED, it follows the adventures of Geralt of Rivia in a fantasy world created by Andrzej Sapkowski. In our review of Witcher 3, we underlined the free roaming in a medieval environment, Witcher 3 stands today as the most graphically demanding videogame on the market. With recommended specs that require an i7 3770 at 3.4 GHz coupled with an Nvidia GTX 770 or a Radeon R9 290, it quickly becomes obvious that some serious upgrades will be required to run this game.

In this respect, the GTX 980 comes as a perfect bargain. Cheaper than a Titan X but being effectively a Titan X for casual people, Witcher 3 will have no problem running on this machine as we will show next.

On our machine, we ran Witcher 3, again, on Ultra settings, 1080p resolution, VSync off and with Maximum Frames Per Second set on Unlimited.

Witcher 3 - GPU load
Witcher 3 - GPU load

Yet, when the Witcher decides to cross the 60 FPS threshold, it goes only one or two frames higher.

Although it’s not as memory hungry as Battlefield 4’s resolution scale multiplier, Witcher 3 relies quite a lot on GPU power for rendering physics and environment animation.

We could notice that even when we set the game free from the shackles of framerate limitations, it won’t go higher than 63 FPS no matter what we’d do to it. Optimizing it in Nvidia Experience driver will not improve its framerate either.

Still, the game works and looks gorgeous with absolutely no stuttering or FPS spikes. For inexplicable reasons, the game has 20 FPS in main menu, prompting the player to immediately search how to enable the hardware cursor because of the lag.

Being a fresh title, it’s only normal to have quirks or faulty optimization sequences, but even so, the new GTX 980 runs this game without a fault at Ultra settings, offering both fast and crisp experience while playing.

Overall, Nvidia GTX 980 Ti is exactly what it is advertised to be: a powerful, punchy graphics card that brings the best of Titan X features in a more affordable package. It doesn’t have 12 but 6 GB of memory, it has 256 less shaders and 14 less texture units, and still we consider it quite the same.

After testing it on the latest and most graphically demanding games on the market, we concluded that for half the price of a Titan, it’s worth every penny.

It's half the price but not half as strong, for its price it’s actually better.

But for those of you who can wait a little longer, AMD has announced that it’ll introduce its next generation of HBM Radeon GPUs on June 16. Considering the lower AMD prices and the new cutting-edge technology it will come with this summer, an even better bargain than the GTX 980Ti will probably arrive quite soon.

If this doesn’t convince you, then maybe wait for some prices to drop for the original GTX 980 and then you'll decide what your future investment will look like. Just make sure it’s DirectX 12 ready.

Battlefield and Witcher (19 Images)

Nvidia GTX 980Ti
GTX 980Ti - High Performance ResultsGTX 980Ti - Extreme Results
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