Conclusion, Pricing, and Final Thoughts
Sitting down for lunch last week with Jonah Alben, one of the lead designers on Maxwell, I couldn't help but notice the excitement he had over this particular GPU. I previously talked with him before the Tegra K1 release and he quietly told me that so much of what they had learned in the development of that mobile SoC would dramatically change how they built desktop and notebook GPUs. At the time, I took it merely as fluff for the story on the K1, but looking through our results here today you can clearly see that he was being honest. The GM204 and Maxwell architecture is fundamentally better than any other GPU design that NVIDIA has built before, and maybe better than any other GPU available today, period.
The performance of the GeForce GTX 980 is impressive, but doesn't quite mix-up the high end market as some people might have thought it would a year or so ago. My experiences gaming with the GTX 980 proved it was the best single GPU graphics card you can get today; better than the GTX 780 Ti, better than the Titan Black, and better than the Radeon R9 290X. Benchmarks and real-world game play proved that to be true: the GTX 980 was as much as 15% faster than the R9 290X and was only beaten by the AMD flagship card in one of our six games. The GTX 780 Ti falls into the same path as the R9 290X – faster in only a single competition (Skyrim) against the newest member of the GeForce family.
The GTX 970 might be a better overall package if you include pricing, but it's performance is also worth noting again. For just $329 it is able to outperform AMD's Radeon R9 290 and the GeForce GTX 780. And again, that advantage is up to 15%, and comes in a dead heat in a couple of cases.
What makes these wins for the GTX 980 and GTX 970 so impressive is not the scale or ratio by which they outperform the R9 290X or GTX 780 Ti, but that it is being done on fairly modestly pressed silicon. Keep in mind that the GTX 780 Ti has 2880 CUDA cores, while the GTX 980 has 2048. The GTX 780 Ti has a 384-bit memory bus, the GTX 980 a 256-bit bus. The GTX 780 Ti has a 250 watt TDP, the GTX 980 only 165 watts. The GTX 780 Ti launched for $699 last November, the GTX 980 launches at $549.
The same is true for the GTX 970 – fewer cores, smaller memory bus, less power, lower price. When the GTX 780 launched it did so at $649; now the GTX 970 sells for $329 out the gate.
The GeForce GTX 980 does leave the door open slightly for AMD and the Radeon R9 290X. Before this article went live AMD was already sending out emails pointing out sales on the R9 290X on Newegg. You can find those parts for as low as $479 (sometimes under that even without a rebate) and that gives it a price advantage of $70 – not a small amount even on the high end of enthusiast graphics. Had NVIDIA gone with a $499 price though…it would be hard to see AMD not having to react.
NVIDIA has slammed the door shut with the GTX 970 and its aggressive $329 starting price point, well under the $389 you see the Radeon R9 290 selling for today. The next card down on AMD's stack, the R9 280X, just can't hold up a performance argument with the GTX 970 so AMD is going to have drop prices on the smaller Hawaii chip to play catch up.
- GeForce GTX 980 4GB – $549
- GeForce GTX 970 4GB – $329
- AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB – $479
- AMD Radeon R9 290 4GB – $389
- GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3GB – $629
- GeForce GTX 780 3GB – $479
UPDATE: The GeForce GTX 980 cards and GTX 970 cards are showing up on Amazon.com this morning. Don't worry, those 3-4 week shipping times are more than likely just filler as Amazon updates their stock counts.
- GTX 980
- GTX 970
NVIDIA has left quite a bit of space between the GTX 970 and the GTX 980 in terms of both pricing and performance. I assume it doesn't take a genius to figure out that a GTX 970 Ti might be coming down the pipe, sooner rather than later, to fill that spot AMD will assuredly snuggle into.
Did I forget to mention overclocking? Getting consistent clock speeds of nearly 1500 MHz provides jaw-dropping statistics but also provides a sizeable performance boost for any users willing to undertake the minor challenge.
If you have a GeForce GTX 780 Ti, GTX 780, or GTX 770 in your system and have been debating going for an SLI setup, you might want to set some pricing alerts. All three of those cards have been discontinued so when the stock that is out there is gone, they are gone. Even if you don't have one already, getting a GTX 780 Ti for $499 or $450 would be a great deal at this point.
From a features stand point, the GTX 980/970 and GM204 have some interesting additions to keep in mind. HDMI 2.0 support is pretty nice and the ability to run three DisplayPort connections on a single NVIDIA GPU is new as well. MFAA and its performance advantages have yet to be seen as NVIDIA is apparently still tweaking things to get the right before sending it out into the world for criticism. Dynamic Super Resolution is a cool trick that makes downsampling incredibly easy for PC gamers and should add some image quality to games that can't get it any other way and offers improved gaming experiences for users that are still using 1920×1080 monitors – which is apparently most of you.
Even though NVIDIA decided to not go as aggressive as I'd like on price with the GeForce GTX 980, the raw power efficiency of these two new graphics cards blows me away. The fact that our reference GTX 980 is able to outperform the R9 290X while using 130 watts LESS POWER says a lot. I mean, with a 165 watt TDP, that is almost another whole GTX 980 card worth of power being used. Even comparing NVIDIA to NVIDIA, the GTX 980 can beat the GTX 780 Ti while using 85 watts less power at the wall. The GTX 970 sees similar advantages to its competition: 80 watts lower than the R9 290 and 55 watts lower than the GTX 780.
We have quite a few retail cards already in the office with these new GPUs so you can expect some reviews of them to find their way out over the next couple of weeks. But today, both of these cards are the top competitors in their respective market positions. The GTX 980 offers unmatched single GPU performance with power efficiency not seen before. If you choose to eschew that though, feel free to push those clocks to 1400-1500 MHz and crank up the power for more performance. The GTX 970 craters the AMD Radeon R9 290 in terms of price and performance, while again offering the same power and overclocking headroom.
I have a lot more to test, a lot more to review and I am really looking forward to how AMD counters this punch in 2014!
GeForce GTX 980 4GB
GeForce GTX 970 4GB
From the benchmarks it seems
From the benchmarks it seems obvious to me that the game is CPU bottlenecked. The highest FPS is outside of combat. During combat the FPS all drops to 100fps no matter 1440p or 4k. This is my experience as well, from looking at CPU/GPU usage while playing Skyrim. Since it’s limited to 2 cores, basically a highly overclocked 4 core is the way to go. However, with something like ENB, I wonder if that’ll shift enough of the burden towards the GPU to the point where a better GPU solution actually does something.
I am talking about Skyrim,
I am talking about Skyrim, BTW, in my above comment.
Ryan are you planning on
Ryan are you planning on testing multimonitor in the near future?
Below is my question.
For example: I have my 7950 sapphire flex in crossfire. I play eyefinity games at 5920×1440. My 3 screens are 1680x1050x2 (16×10) for the outiside screens. And my u2711 at 2560×1440 (16×9) in the middle. All are dp monitors.
I do this because for the games that do not support multi monitor. I like the bigger 2560×1440 screen.
It would be great to know if Nvidia has updated surround capabilities to match AMD’s!
I’m happy to see nVidia
I’m happy to see nVidia endorse downsampling in the form of a supported feature. I’m curious about the downsampling filter they use though – a 13-tap Gaussian filter should produce a decently sharp image without ringing, but is there any word on whether or not it is gamma-aware? That last detail is important when downsampling and particularly for high-contrast details.
Hi,
I have a request to
Hi,
I have a request to benchmark skyrim with enb. full quality.
real vision option a full quality is a good videocard destroyer!
my system is i7 4820k @ 4.5ghz and a 290X
skyrim at 4k without enb is 45-50fps
enb on full quality is 17-19FPS..
can you setup a skyrim enb benchmark for reference from now on?
im very interested in your benchmarks for skyrim enb with 290x, 780ti, 970gtx and 980gtx
I know its alot of work but please please please! hehehe
ohhh, if you do, please add
ohhh, if you do, please add unoffical hd textures, flora overhaul and that hurts performance even more! makes the game so beautiful to play…
Most of those supplements
Most of those supplements work by stopping the cause
of baldness. Excess consumption of zinc may cause bleeding stomach and severe abdominal pain. There are only 2 St Johns wort products that I know of,
that have had been properly researched and the Flordis Remotiv is one of those.
My site … ev44.pl (Priscilla)
I have been watching your
I have been watching your channel for a long time now. I would like to say that i enjoy the thorough way in which you benchmanrk every card. That being said, i would guess to say that 98% of pc gamers play in 1080p. Im wondering why you test such hi resolutions? Im sure you have 1080p benchmarks on another page. I just feel raked over the coals with GSync and 4K. Im tired of forking over thousands for small increases in performance. This bleeding edge is making my wallet bleed!
I agree with Shaun, the
I agree with Shaun, the realvision ENB would be a great benchmark tester as with the realvision ENB on skyrim. I had average of 15fps in open area outside of white run and the rest. Was average of 20-35fps on a gigabyte r9 290x OC 4gb and I’m not sure if that did but my card eventually broke Or overheating issues but wouldn’t load into windows just a black screen with fans spinning fullspeed after windows load screen after POST. So I RMA’d that card. And got credit refund and bought the MSI GTX 970 4Gb and waiting for it to arrived with also with a new motherboard.
So I think that it would be a great Benchmark as it really pushes the GPU not so much the CPU and Skyrim with mods normally uses upto 4gb of VRAM
Anyway Thanks
Awesome Review, SLI power
Awesome Review, SLI power consumption for dual 980’s is hard to come by and you sir have slayed my doubts about overdrawing a 850W power supply. THANKYOU!!! 😀
Im going to build this
Im going to build this system
I7 4790K
SLI gtx 970s
16gb ram 1600mhz
Is a 630 watt PSU sufficient to run in sli? If yes can i also overclock?
630W? are you using a brand
630W? are you using a brand name PSU?
Dont trust PSU’s that come preinstalled with a case..
I would think 630 would be buggy for SLI..
you want at least 25% to spare.. I’d say at least a 750W..
Tho my Coolermaster ran 2x R9 280’s fine.. but that was me slightly underclocking my cpu so allow that..
just make sure the psu is a quality one.
Where AMD will have problems,
Where AMD will have problems, not so much in pricing, but in the thermals that are required for the mini/micro sized systems for HTPC/Etc. that may not be able to take the AMD SKUs even if the prices are lower, getting as much GPU power into as small a form factor as possible is going to be a much more important market segment, as more of these products are being introduced.
Small portable form factor portable mini desktop systems, linked wirelessly to tablets, and relying on the mini desktop for most of the processing needs, are going to appear, systems that can be easily carried around in a laptop bag, along with a tablet, the tablet acting as the desktop host for direct(Via ad hoc WiFi) remote into the mini desktop PC. these type of systems will be more powerful than a laptop(the Mini PC part of the pair), but just as portable, and plugged in at the coffee houses/ETC. and wirelessly serving games, and compute to one, or more tablets. Fitting More powerful discrete GPUs into these systems that will not overburden the limited cooling available in the Mini/Micro form factor will be a big business, especially for gaming/game streaming on the go, and taking these devices along while traveling, and having a device that can be configured to be more like a laptop when on battery power, but ramp up the power beyond what a laptop is capable of while plugged in.
Can i run gtx970 on my intel
Can i run gtx970 on my intel DH61HO Motherboard??
It’s obvious Ryan you have
It’s obvious Ryan you have taken heaps of time doing this (well done mate), but as someone wanting to build a rig to use on a big TV, I’m holding back until I can get my head around the 4k TV vs PC gaming output thing.
HDMI and 4k is my worry. I’ll be buying a big (thinking 65″) TV, only 4k for the gaming. It’ll do service as a normal TV too, but in Australia it’ll be obsolete before we see 4k content on the air! So that leaves gaming.
Is a big 4k TV a good option for high resolution gaming? Or are there land mines hidden in HDMI 1.x/2.x specs that’ll catch out the unaware? Certainly look better than 3 monitors.
It looks like the 980 will push BF4 to 4k @ ~30fps, but is that enough, or is SLI to get 45-60fps needed to be a pleasure to play?
A pair of 290x SLI watercooled would have to be an option, quiet yet in the running on fps. OK, uses more power but the purchase price difference buys a lot of electricity, unless water cooling costs a bomb!
Why are the specific settings
Why are the specific settings not disclosed?
That’s pretty much benchmarking 101, and things like AA & AO can make a massive difference.
While this is the only place
While this is the only place I have seen that has benchmarked Skyrim in 4k with a 970, and Thank you very much for that! But what settings did you use? You post what settings you used at the top? But did the 970 really pull ~50 fps at 4k with 8x A and ultra? Find that hard to believe. I have a new 4k Samsung and really just want to play Skyrim in vanilla 4k, no need for AA and trying to decide if 970 is enough.