Hardware Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Review

^^Type faster that man.

My 670 will be getting replaced with a 970 just not sure when to do it.

I always miss a generation as the gains never seem to be worth it other wise.

Do people think the prices will stay as is or will we see increases due to demand?

 

Awesome and thank you.

Now I just need to wait for the Impact VII... Yes, I know I go on and on about it.

 

Damnit the 970 in Canada is $380 - $400.........

 

Probably try and stay the same, from Hexus

 

Depending how big the card is I might be tempted to upgrade, only had this 670 a year or so, maybe less but I'm getting a bit of the upgrade bug (and at 1440p the extra oomph is always nice)

 

True when you look at just performance.

I'm still skeptical that the 980 is truly a high end card when looking at what is possible from the new microarchitecture. Nvidia made the move to Maxwell with the 750 still using a 28nm fab (intentional), the 980/70 still uses that same 28nm fab but my guess is that wasn't the intention.

The 980/70 should have used 20nm (imho) but that wasn't available due to customer demand, i think that's why the 750 uses the GM107 code name, yet the 980/70 uses the GM204 code name and also why the jump from 700 to 900 series.

Now I'm only going on rumors and speculation but i would expect Nvidia to make the change to 20nm in the first half of 2015 if that's the case and the rumors remain accurate about the GM206, GM200 as they were about predicting the GM204 then i would expect to see at least two cards faster than the 980 before they move to the Pascal microarchitecture.

Obviously all that's pure conjecture on my part but it's fun to guess about what maybe around the corner.

 

Are we getting the 970 reviews today? Its no big deal now as ordering anything at this point will only arrive on Monday regardless, I'm just curious.

 

Thanks for all the hard work today good chap

Think I'm going to go for a stock 970. Makes sli'ing later easier.

 

So what took you so long?


Epic work, Matt. Thank you.

 

I agree with the thanks. These are all definitely appreciated.

 

Well it's definitely a big slice of humble pie for me. I recently bought a 2GB 770 for £230 despite being told to hold off until the new cards came out, and right enough... within a few weeks the 970 is out for only a smidgen more (ok - to be fair, the equivalent Gigabyte 970 will be £298 when available, so considerably more), and it's a MUCH more powerful card than I expected it would be, outperforming the 780 in nearly every review. So you guys were right about the new card being worth waiting for!

But am I gutted? Not really... I don't need to have the latest and greatest and I'm very happy with the 770; it should last me for the full 3 year warranty period even if I upgrade to a 2560 display.

And all things considered, even if I had waited for the new tech I suspect I'd be hard pushed to get a 970 because my budget was as close to £200 as possible and I'd still have gone for the 770, which remains remarkable value at £210-215. I guess a bigger selling point of the 970 is that it comes with 4GB as standard.

@Spreadie, looks like the 970 would be a pretty bitchin' upgrade from your 680, but it all depends what one you go for. As I understand it, your 680 is probably as good as most 770s. If you want an idea of comparative performance, give me a shout.

 

I hate how expensive it has all gone in the past few years. The last top of the line card I bought was the 8800 GTX several years ago now, and it was about £350. But that could run anything cranked as high as you could push it. It now costs about £450 for a card like this which is not only not the high end option anymore, but it doesn't even do the job especially well.

If you have a nice monitor with something like 2,560 x 1,440 resolution, then even this very expensive card can only run Crysis3 for example at about 42 fps. And that is with no AA. If you had a more modern game and wanted AA, even with this brand new card, it would run like crap. And with 4k or multiple monitors it is just out of the question running at 19fps. You would need at least two, but preferably something even more expensive.

It is nice that there are more options now for gear, you don't have to have a resolution that high, but my monitor is lovely, it is 2,560 x 1,080, and it only cost a few hundred. But to not compromise with games settings I need to spend at least £450 nowadays. And if some really pretty comes out in the next year or two it would struggle. It is an expensive hobby now. When it was £350 for top end, it didn't seem too bad, it was still a big chunk of cash for a single component but it was £100 cheaper than today, and it felt good knowing it was top of the line. Top of the tree now is about £2200 for titan z. Madness.

 

I think you've answered your own comment TBH, you have to spend more now to play at a higher resolution than you were spending to play at a lower resolution several years back.

Also games now have a higher 'max' bar so to speak so you have to push harder than you used to.

 

I'm actually HAPPY with the pricing. I bought my current 2 570GTX's for £255 each. Both the 670 and 770 launched at over £300, making the price of sli'ing considerably more expensive than what I paid for the 570's. Now we are back to 5xx series pricing and its finally time for me to upgrade

 

Exactly my reasoning too.

 

Excellent review, told me everything I didn't want to hear

@LennyRhys: Don't worry about it, I bought an MSI 780 OC for £389 in January this year and for £378 I could now get the MSI bundle - MSI GTX970 + Z97 mobo
At least the 970 doesn't massively beat the 780, and the 780 actually bests the 970 in a few areas (4K just!).

I bought the 780 so I could play Skyrim at a decent FPS with an ENB mod which are real frame killers and it does that no problem and handles all my other games easily so I can't complain, but the fact that the 970 will do all that and has another 1GB of VRAM and costs £100 less is cruel, progress sucks

 

You might have bought the 8800 longer ago than you think, if you paid £350 for it that was max price when it first came out in 2006, 8 years is a long time in PC gaming and many people were still using VGA CRT's @ 800 x 600

Compared to the 8800 (I still have a BFG 8800 that works fine) the 970 is a gaming monster and costs about a £100 less than the 8800 when it was released, so it ain't all bad

 

Mmm, not quite, GT8800 cost over £300 when released in 2006, 970 costs around £250