Hardware Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Review

Jesus, you're not going to get everything at once. For the people that splashed out on a 780/780 Ti, obviously this isn't for them. But, Maxwell looks mighty good to someone like me, looking to replace a 550 Ti. The 650 Ti wasn't enough of an upgrade, the 650 Ti Boost was tasty but didn't last long. Now I can get a 750 Ti with double the performance of the 550 Ti at significantly less power.

For the flagship cards, they'll take what they've done here and get back on improving performance for the next generation. At least, I'm figuring they're not planning on a 780/Titan/780 Ti situation two generations in a row.

At the moment, though, now I'm wondering what the next generation's numbering scheme will be.

 

They have only just released this generation and you are already thinking of next gen.
I would expect to see GTX 990, 1000 and more to come next year first.

 

thing is a 980 is next up from a 780 etc


any reviews of the 970 btw?

 

I've just told my partner what I would like for Christmas but, I think I will be out of luck :-(

 

It'll be interesting to see the rest of the range landing - power savings across the board?

It does make my own personal choice a bit difficult in a year or so, but I'm hoping there'll be a new faster card out by then (a new Titan?).

 

Considering how close the 970 is to the 980 I suspect 2x 970 will be the high end sweetspot for a quite a long time to come.

 

STOP POSTING HERE GET BACK TO WORK!

 

Looking forward to that 3 card review Dogger666, don't kill your self with the workload, folks can wait a few hours for a proper in depth review !

I think this months wages will be going on a 970 to complete my new PC so a three card review line up is perfect.

 

Take your time and get out a quality article rather than something rushed.. we can wait (just about!)

 

Great review however bit odd that you pit the latest version of Geforce drivers, when the AMD cards are with the ancient drivers (13.12 or 14.4 beta).

The performance boost between 13.12 and 14.8 WHQL is pretty significant.

 

Nice 980 review. Can't wait for the 970 review!

 

The top card's price is too high but I assume has been done so to allow a reasonable dumping of the remaining 700 series stock - the 970 however, looks buyable at current price, even though in past years the Gx#04 GPU's have been used only on mid range cards carrying the x60 tag, I can't help feeling that the performance and price of these still enables Nvidia to make an absolute margin killing.

As I am a 1080P gamer with a 4gb 770GTX I'll probably wait for the proper 20nm high end GM2#0 cards to be released (I assume end of Q1 next year?) and buy a 1440P monitor at same time so I can enjoy the graphical grunt

 

The OCd EVGA 970 looks like it may tempt the 570 Phantom out of my case as it almost matches the 980 reference

 

Have you waited until the missus is away to upgrade your PC, you devil?

 

Shhh. All she knows is in the crates getting shipped over is going to be my dismantled PC

Reminds me, I reallly have to get a list together of a loooot of things to sell.

 

I really hope that the upcoming 3-way GTX 970 review features both the MSI and the ASUS cards...

 

I've just bought an EVGA GTX 980 SC from Scan for delivery tomorrow morning as an upgrade for my vanilla EVGA GTX 780. I think the card offers enough performance improvements and features to make it worthwile, plus the 4 GB of VRAM is going to be very useful. I play games at 1920x1200 but even at that resolution there are a growing number of games which hit 3 GB of VRAM usage; Watch_Dogs for example.

The 256-bit memory bus is a bit disappointing in a flagship card but the lossless compression helps make up for that and it seems that lower resolutions like the one I use benefit more from it than the higher ones, which really need 384 or 512-bit buses more.

 

Well played.

Yeah, otherwise shipping to bit members could be a bitch.

In other news - I'm really looking forward to the 970 reviews. I may just have to upgrade at that price.