Graphics Do you feel the Nvidia 9xx series in general has thus far been a bit of a let down?

I appreciate that power consumption has been drastically improved with Maxwell and that's great for laptop and mobile GPU's but in my desktop, I and probably many other people only really care about performance/money. I admittedly am behind the times with my Archaic AMD cpu and pair of power hungry GTX 480's which consume pretty large amounts of power (and generate lots of heat) but I'm okay with that. I have an ATX case because I have a large, non portable system that I want to have reasonable space for upgrade potential and cooling, that's what I've had for years and I made that decision for a reason.

With these GPU's we've once again been served up mid-range GPU's with high end names and price-tags. These are chips with narrow memory buses and many architectural concessions in respect to the products they're replacing. This happened before with the 6xx series, but the GTX 680 was at least as fast in benchmarks as the twin GPU solution of the previous generation, the GTX 590. This generation however we've got the 980, 970 and 960 so far, and they've all, in my opinion, been rather underwhelming.

I will point out that I personally have chosen to use Nvidia products in my desktop builds for many years, and will probably continue to do so, although I will likely be skipping this generation.

The GTX 980 being the flagship GPU at the current time would be expected based on past experience to compete with the outgoing Dual GPU solution. In the past we've had the 295 comparing similarly to the 480, the 590 to the 680 and the 690 comparing similarly to 780Ti. It's muddied this time however by the fact that we didn't technically get a 7xx series dual GPU solution, but what we did get was the Titan Z. Anyone who can read beyond the marketing knows that the Titan Z is ultimately just a pair of the 780Ti cores, with twice the VRAM, and down-clocked slightly as we've come to expect, in spite of it's triple slot cooler.

So In my opinion, and some may disagree with this, I would expect, like with every generation before, the 980 to perform similarly to the Titan Z, which would indicate that the performance you get for your money is a strong progression from the previous options on the market. And Does it? Not even close. In fact in the majority of tests it's still slower than a GTX 690! It's simply not in the same ball park. See Guru3D if you want to see comparisons yourself.

Some people will say "Well the Titan Z is a £3000 card, you wouldn't expect that performance now for ~£400" And I disagree. The reason that card is so expensive is everything to do with it's non-crippled Double precision floating point support and pretty much nothing to do with it's general performance relative to the rest of the product range. If Nvidia had of launched a GTX 790 dual GPU card with Titan Z performance and half the framebuffer for ~£800-£1000 (as they have done in the past) I don't think you'd be disagreeing with me.

Ultimately, when I'm asked to part with £400 for the flagship single GPU card, I expect to receive something akin to a fire breathing monster. I want every effort to have been made to ensure that it is as fast as possible and the 980 just seems to go the other way. It's quiet, cool, tame and underpowered and has an architecture which reads like the card which should have been the midrange 960 and that's not what I want at all. I want the full fat, wide memory bus, solid architecture variant which should be on this card, which will undoubtably be launched at some point in the near-ish future at a tremendous price premium.


The GTX 970 garnered a lot of praise when it landed and you can see why, It offered pretty strong performance at a price point which is substantially discounted from that of the 980 which made reviewers with their eyes on just the two cards very happy. With the revelations about the memory configuration it's maybe become a little more obvious, quite why the price of these cards is so low, even though Nvidia claim their technical marketing department were unaware of the screw up.

With the consumer now aware that early adopters were mislead and that the card is in fact a 3.5GB+0.5GB card with less cache and ROPS, confidence has been shaken in these cards. Many people have ultimately ended up returning them and trading up to 980's. You can see from Nvidia's perspective that being able to disable a faulty L2 cache and still have a card with a full complement of RAM is a benefit, they'll get better yields which will mean cheaper costs, better margins and in theory a more competitive product, but if people are sending them back, and more wary to buy them, it's not going to work out so well for them.

Ultimately they're still a reasonably fast card but we're still putting that in context of the 980 which as above is not at the level of performance we'd like it to be. With games consoles now having 8GB of ram shared across their GPU and CPU (with most developers I've heard allocating 4GB to the GPU) GPU's need alot of ram, especially if you still want to be using them for the next few years, perhaps in SLI with the higher resolutions people expect. We've already seen some games like watchdogs asking alot of the Vram available and this will only get worse over the coming years. In light of this I'd personally be very wary of purchasing a card with a somewhat hobbled memory infrastructure, and I'd definitely not expect it's performance to hold up well over the coming years.


The GTX 960 for me is almost the biggest disappointment. Nvidia have often been strong in the ~£200 area and with the launch of this card we've seen one of the worst abuses of using an underpowered core in a card that I can remember in all the years I've followed computer hardware. This is a mid range card with a 128bit memory interface, and I know it has compression but that width, in this day and age with the upcoming high end AMD GPU featuring a 1024bit interface, is simply ridiculous. Again from a power consumption perspective it makes sense but again, if I'm paying £200 for a gaming GPU, I want the absolute most I can get for my money, almost more-so than with the high end example where you almost expect to pay a little over the odds simply to have the best.

What we've been given is a GPU which is worthy to be a 950 at best, and as a result fails to comprehensively outperform the GPU it replaces. It's rare that happens, and in this case it's a trickle down result of the fact that the mid range card which should be in this space, is being used for the 980. Yes it's power consumption is good, but it should be given how the performance in this segment has failed to improve. With this card you'd expect similar performance to the GTX 770, which it fails to meet by a long margin, along with failing to meet the 760. Given this card then should fill the spot of the 950 (or 950 Ti) a fair-ish comparison would be with the 750Ti, from which power consumption is dramatically increased. (92w to 119w) even though performance is also substantially greater.

Ultimately it's a bit of a travesty that this card is on the market with it's current moniker, and I have every belief that a higher spec'd 960Ti version will be released in the near future with a further cut down version of the 980 and 970 core we've already seen. Let's just hope that they don't make a complete mess of the memory interface again.


I'd like to hear people opinions on this, Am I behind the times? are people really happy that performance gain is being lost in the name of power consumption and that GPU cores are being put on the market in completely incorrect positions? Also if you got this far, thank you for taking the time to read this

 

I'm really happy with my 970, I was slightly concerned about the 4gb thing but I haven't exprienced it so far as I'm only running at 1920x1200. I probably won't upgrade my monitor anytime soon so I probably will never have any issue, if I did upgrade it would only be to 2560x1440 which I believe shouldn't cause any issues. (no interest in 4k).

I thought my card was faulty the other day but found out it was riva server, part of MSI after burner that was making my fps in BF4 drop to 5fps every 10 seconds or so, managed to find out what was causing it by systematically shutting things down. Thought I'd mention this in case anyone else was having the same issue.

I do think the 960 is a little pointless though but then there will be people looking to buy that sort of card and it would be a better purchase than it's 7 series equivalent epending on price of course.

 

EDIT: Removed

The 780Ti was not released for months after the 780 (6+), which meant that the range was actually topped by the 780 3GB costing a mere £550. So fully expect a 980Ti down the line, but it also means the 980 today is priced cheaper than the 780 was by a pretty reasonable amount.

The 980 is not "underpowered" - it's an absolute monster, but one that reflects the new priorities of heat and power efficiency. It's faster than a 780Ti, but markedly more efficient. If NVIDIA just wanted speed I'm sure they could have provided it, but then they'd be where AMD were/are with the R9 series that absolutely needed third party cooling due to being so damn hot.

As for the 970, isn't that ridiculous thread in here enough? It's the same card as it was when it launched, it benches exactly the same, but they need to change two numbers on review data (nb: not actually published on any retail site or anywhere outside reviews). Christ, get over it.

 

It didn't occur to me that purchase justification syndrome would play a large part in peoples opinions on this, I spose If I'd already bought one I'd be arguing that I'd made the right decision.

@CrapBag, I disagree with your assessment that running at 1200 or 1440p shouldn't cause an issue. We've already seen the lazier console ports eat well into 3+GB of ram at these resolutions and so in the next two years you should easily be able to run out and have to sacrifice quality.

@The_Crapman, if you look back at Nvidia "professional" grade GPU's over the years they have generally been *less* powerful than their desktop equivalents. With the launch of the 8800GTX, GTX 280 and GTX 480 each card had a fuly featured architecture and had the most performance of any single GPU in the lineup. Smaller cores were used for midrange GPUs. What's happened now is Nvidia is ripping customers off by charging more for these fully featured cores as "Prosumer or professional" cards and giving the consumer mid range architectures in the place of their high end purchase. They did this with the GTX 680 and again with the 980.
Also I don't think we'll see a 980Ti With the fully featured architecture unless AMD put serious pressure on Nvidia with their next release. They'll save that core for a new titan and then next release as they did with the 6xx and 7xx series.


@Cei, [removed] You're right they charged a premium for the 780Ti which was the fully enabled core which should have been in the 680, and this core is cheaper to produce (cos it's a mid range core) so is cheaper. That doesn't make it not "underpowered" and it's not a "monster". Those terms are relative. When the GTX 480 was launched people called it a monster, would you still call it that now? Relative to its competition, it's barely faster than a 780 Ti and while it is more efficient that's what you'd expect, from a 970, not a 980. Also the R9 series draw barely any more power than the GTX 480 and while they are both Hot running cards, it is perfectly manageable in a reasonably sized case for a proper gaming PC.

As for the 970 I'm just giving my opinion on the matter in the context of the 9xx series as a whole. It's a bit more than just changing two numbers it has a fundamental implication on the what we can expect from future cut down GPUs and means we have to fundamentally change how we look at memory on a GPU. I'd say it's a bit too important to just "get over"

 

Max I've seen it hit is 2gb in BF4 with everying on Ultra, think I'm good for a while I upgrade every 2 years and I've had this one for 4 months so far.

 

BF4 is over a year old, and a reasonable port, look more at watch dogs or ac unity for examples of how it can go the other way. I tend to look more at being able to SLI a setup in the future and so would expect to keep a high end card for 3-4 years as many others would I feel.

 

Rude? Hardly, I just think you posted a load of waffle.

The 780Ti launched and pushed the prices of the 780 down by a few hundred quid. If that happens to the 980, we could easily be seeing them for the sub-£400 and into the mid £300s range. That's a bargain in the current GPU market. It also means your assessment is off, because the 7xx series did not launch with a card equivalent to a 690, because the 780Ti took another six months to come out.

As for comparing the 480 to the R9 series, that's hilarious. The 480 is an old card and AMD shouldn't be releasing products that compare to it in terms of heat and power draw. NVIDIA have clearly shown that their focus at the moment is power efficiency, and yes, that has come at the expense of pure performance increases.

There's also a big increase in interest in ITX and MATX compact builds in recent times, so no, I disagree with your statement that "it is perfectly manageable in a reasonably sized case", because lots of people no longer want large ATX cases. The pint sized 970 is a perfect example of why Maxwell makes perfect sense, ditto the bus powered 750Ti that was the first Maxwell card.

As for the 970, you're giving your opinion. It really is a change in two numbers on the spec sheet. NVIDIA have used segmented memory multiple times in the past and nobody has batted an eye, the difference being that this time a mistake was made on reviews that doesn't alter the performance of the cards one iota. NVIDIA haven't gone and pulled chips out of the 970, or even crippled it via a firmware update. It is exactly the same card as it was at launch, we just know more about it. Obviously some people are upset about it (despite the issue actually affecting about 3 of them) and they can just return the cards. Does it reduce my trust in NVIDIA? No, because they certainly didn't intend for this to happen and a mistake was made. If anything, it means they'll double check this kind of thing in the future and actually reduce the likelihood of it happening again.

The 960 is a good card, just priced a bit to high. That will sort itself out.

Basically, I think you're trying to complain that GPUs have gotten expensive?


EDIT: However, I do apologise if you believe I was rude. It was not my intent.

 

I agree to an extent, I mean who wouldn't want them to throw everything into the GPU giving as much performance as possible while keeping price and other things acceptable. On the flip side, I'd argue the 980 and 780ti are pretty damn powerful and so long as they do what they need to do then I'm happy. Whether they could have sold them for less who knows, I'm sure the R&D isn't cheap and if the price of the GPUs are at a point that is viable then fine.

Personally I'm curious about AMDs 300 series, lets hope they actually release it soon and with a decent cooler this time - then they can't be branded as hot and noisy.

Edit: TBH Cei, it came off as rude to me too.

 

Maybe in the future ports will be better, I mean look at GTAV on PC it's looking to be a different game altogether so hopefully it won't be a bad port.

As for going down the SLi route I think that's a pretty small usage scenerio in the bigger picture of things.

It's all about what the individual users requirements are, as I say I tend to upgrade every two years, your upgrade cycle is longer at 3-4 years so you see it as less suitable.

Hopefully I'm not making a mistake by not RMAing mine but then I can't afford to upgrade to a 980, as much as I'd like to, so I'm kinda stuck anyways.

 

@Cei The difference is the 780 was not a fully enabled GPU, some of the clusters were disabled, hence 2304 cores not 2880 and so there was the potential for the Ti when the 780 launched. The 780 Ti launch was also a reactionary response to the competition. The 980 in comparison is a fully enabled Maxwell GM204 GPU, they have no more to offer short of moving to a heavily disabled, higher spec core. As such I don't think they'll launch a 980Ti. Also that doesn't affect that at the current time, I feel the 980 offers poor value for money.

In terms of the R9 / 480 bit, the PCI-E specification allows a single GPU to have a 300w Max power consumption while still being PCI-E compliant. I would rather that the highest spec card was a more powerful 250-300w card with the lower power efficient GM204 core of the 980 further down the product lineup. Nvidia are making this core, and it will at some point be the fastest single GPU card you can buy. But first they'll probably make it a Titan.

Again on the case debate, I'm not saying those cards shouldn't exist, just that you should be able to buy the propper fully specced core as the highest GPU in the £4-500 price bracket.

In terms of the 970 have a read of this article: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8935/geforce-gtx-970-correcting-the-specs-exploring-memory-allocation
They have had segmented memory before but not on a "High end" card and not with this performance division. What wont happen again is they wont try to cover it up, but there will be more examples of cards with this kind of division, and we can speculate it may get worse. What if the 960Ti has 4Gb with only 2.5GB of full speed and 1.5GB of low speed ram? Will you still be happy that nvidia are going down this path?

Agree there's a place for the 960's core but it shouldn't be a 960 and so yes, shouldn't be priced as such.

I'm not arguing that GPU's are too expensive, I'm arguing that they are now worse value for money and nvidia are ripping the consumer off for what they're getting. In the past you'd get a new architecture with a big bump (GTX 280, GTX 480) and then a die shrink with a smaller performance bump (GTX 285, GTX 580). Now you get a Mid range core pretending to be high end one (GTX 680, GTX 980) and then get the Fully spec'd architecture the next year (GTX 780/Ti). It gives a smoother year to year improvement (although it hasn't this time) but means that buying those mid range cores represents a poor investment and poor value for money.

 

I think you're getting hung up on your internal definitions of cores and how that relates to performance. To me, it seems that you believe that "top end = unlocked core, nothing disabled". I work on top end being entirely performance based - I couldn't care what happens under the hood in terms of anything being disabled. If NVIDIA have to disable something to get yields to acceptable levels, so be it.

There's always a faster GPU round the corner. We may well be seeing the limit of what can be done with Maxwell right now, and the next Titan will be a new design, but that's just how it goes. It may even be that it gets stripped down and becomes the 980Ti, but something is stopping it being released now - be that low yields that make the core incredibly expensive until the fab tech matures or (hopefully not) competition against AMD.

Are GPUs worse value for money? Maybe. Yes, a top end card used to cost about £300 (200 series as an example), but inflation has happened. Prices have down a bit from the insane £550-600 the 780 cost though. The evolution of architectures is also never linear - look at Intel as a prime example. I think it's hard to define Maxwell as mid-range though - it's faster than Kepler, just not quite as fast as you want it to be, but came with the benefits of reduced heat and power draw.

 

Have to say that I agree with this. I don't think the 9xx series has been underwhelming at all, with the possible exception of the 960 which is relatively mediocre. The 970 is the sweet spot and gives fantastic bang for buck (memory allocation stuff notwithstanding, as we don't know how things will change in the future - but for now we can say that it delivers terrific performance for the price). The 980 is a beast although the price premium over the 970 makes it look a little steep, but it's always a case of diminishing returns with GPUs (or any other technology for that matter).

As for this:

That's a cheap shot. You shouldn't resort to little digs like this if you're going to complain about other users being rude, imo. For the record, I don't own a 9xx series card

 

@Cei I agree I pay a lot of attention, to what's going on under the hood because It has a surprising number of repercussions.

There are several advantages to a card with a more complete architecture.

• Their performance scales better with heavier loads (i.e. Higher res, more filters)
• Their performance remains relatively high for longer
• Their resale value tends to be higher as a result of ^
• They scale better in SLI

and many more. So yes I care about having a more comlex/complete architecture. All those things are a result of more resources on the GPU (ROPS, ALUS, etc), more memory bandwidth, rather than a simpler architecture clocked to a higher speed.

The fact is that Nvidia have made a big Maxwell card, it's already popped up and why wouldn't they? They can scale the architecture as high as they like as long as they can keep yields high and temps under control and we know Maxwell is good at that.

The difference is in the past they would release the new fully fledged architecture straight away even if it ran hot, had high power consumption, and needed some parts slightly disabling. This meant they were giving you the best card they could for your money, how good depended on the semiconductior company used. The change happened because Kepler was a sufficient jump over Fermi that they were able to use the mid range card as a high end and still get a ~1.5-2x performance speed up, which was all the competition had. They could then save the bigger gpu for the next series (which allowed them to work on improving yields and thereby profit margins) and that's got us to the position we had with the 780's, TI's and Titans.

What's happened now is they've tried to do the same thing, but the mid range architecture doesn't have the 1.5-2x improvement over the last fully fledged core, no where near in fact. And as a result, This use of a mid range core, is ripping off the consumer. They may well release the 3072 core version as a 980Ti (or a stripped down version) when AMD release their competition but in the mean time, the 980 is a rip off. We can also extrapolate that for the next series they'll again release a complex architecture card as the x80 edition and it will likely have the same price increase as the 780's due to it's increased complexity. So expect the 1080 (or whatever it's called) to cost £450-550.

I have considered Inflation when I'm making that statement, and I'm not really arguing about the absolute price, you're right it would be forgivable if it was massively cheaper than it is but it's the principle. As the x80 designation card it represents in all liklihood (there's only once been an exception and it wasn't in this part of the cycle) the most powerful single GPU card we'll see this series. And I think that core is not worthy to be in that position.


@The Crapman The scaling across those cards wouldn't be linear. The GPU market used to operate in a tick tock model, with a new architecture and then a die shrink, so the 580 is not hugely faster than a 480, it's just a shrink. The 680 also could have been much faster than it was (if they'd used the 780 core) because maxwell was a big improvement so the jump there would be very good, likewise the jump to 780 Ti was good because it moved from mid spec core to a high spec core. However the move from 780 Ti to 980 is a minimal jump.

Crysis 3 1440p (Guru3d)
780Ti: 44fps - 980 50fps ----------- Poor improvement
580 17fps - 680 30fps ------------- Very strong improvement

@bawjaws You're right I shouldn't of said that, I was just a little taken aback having just read Cei's original post and was maybe too harsh in my response. That said Purchase Justification is a valid thing and would affect results in a poll like this, it would be interesting to establish what percentage of users who voted each way owned 9 series GPUS

 

I think once DirectX 12 becomes the mainstream choice the 970 and 980 will come into their own.

 

That's a fair point although Nvidia have said "Fermi, Kepler, and Maxwell GPUs will fully support the DX12 API."

That said the newer architectures of the 980 and 970 may see them utilise it better but look at the gains we got from Mantle, Performance was minimally increased for the high end setups and the real gains came when a high end GPU was paired with a Low end CPU. I expect, given all cards will support it, we'll see the same with DX12. Also by the time games are released using DX12 the 980 and 970 may well not still be on the market, although I admit I'm not sure of the timescales for when we can expect DX12 games on Windows 10

 

In short, I was disappointed when the 980 launched - I expected a reasonable step up from the 780Ti. I know, "but the 980 is supposed to supercede the 780, not the 780Ti". Tosh. The 780Ti was the top end mainstream card and the 980 offered nothing bar a power saving.

Still an awesome card, as the 780Ti is, no doubt, but disappointing nonetheless.

The 970 is a different kettle of fish - I think it's a cracking card, despite the whole 3.5GB hoohah that got so many knickers in a such a massive twist, that the Gordian knot hid in shame.

The 960 is a joke. A bad joke. And the 960Ti will be the corny punchline, IMO.

 

this 980 here is a good upgrade to the 780ti, but it has some thing like a 1400Mhz overclock from factory which is stupid.

I am seeing around a 20% fps increase and zero judder in the Dk2.

The 980 is an impressive card if we did not have the 780ti, the 780ti smashed it up and gave huge performance, sure fps would drop across triple screen, but it was always above 30 fps for me with max candy and I would see completely fine enough fps with high details in demanding gaming.


The 980 is good enough, but its "just", and just good enough is not enough now, people want to be blown away, from the coffee they drink, to the film they are watching, to the sound they are listening to, to every thing.

The 980 is beautiful engineering improvement, there can be no mistake about that, but that's not enough really, people understand ok the game had 30 fps, I put this card in which cost me £400 and now I am getting 60fps.

You don't get that with the 980.


Also I have to admit as soon as the 980ti comes out I will get the highest version of it and will most likely see a drop of maybe half of the cost of this stupid OC'ed 980? £600.. to what £350?

That's another unacceptable aspect of buying a 980.

In the next 5 years I want to see NVidia impress me. I will pay them well for their products but I am not impressed with talk of the 980ti being available next year, the only reason that is some what palatable is because it ties in with the commercial Oculus.



I would love to go to an Nvidia or Intel fabrication plant.. if they did like a 2 day visitor holiday and walk around and introduction, like a science museum visit, but they explain all the ins and outs of producing some thing as complex as the 980 that would be really some thing.

These products are complete, maybe more complex than a city on the size of a postage stamp.

NVidia might want to completely forget about the 980ti... and start working only on the next generation of GPU because VR is going to be very demanding with decent res panels and super low latency a must. They have a huge new demand coming down the pipe on them and people will instantly sift to AMD if they produce super low latency computer visualization which are better.

Actually I look forward to that day when there is a super clear obvious reason for me to put an AMD card in my gaming machine,

 

Dude, 980 performance at 165W disappointing?!? Stop doing crack. Now.