NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Review - PAGE 1

Almost a year ago, NVIDIA revealed the GTX 780 Ti during a private press event held in Montreal, Canada. The launch of the Kepler-based flagship card was not the only highlight of the 2013 "The Way It's Meant to Be Played" event; NVIDIA also showcased the impressive GameWorks platform and a unique gaming ecosystem that links PC, SHIELD, and Cloud Gaming. Since then, we had a glimpse at the new Maxwell architecture through the GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti. These cards showed the great potential of the new NVIDIA architecture; however enthusiasts were left wanting for more: a high-end card based on Maxwell. The wait is finally over, and today I will be putting all the rumors about the new NVIDIA GTX 900 series to rest!

NVIDIA revealed two new Maxwell-based cards during a press event held in Monterey, CA last week; the GTX 980 and 970. In this review I will be focusing on the GTX 980 flagship card which will be available through regular retail channels beginning September 19, 2014. The GTX 970 will also be available at the same date. Both cards were publicly revealed on September 18, alongside the NVIDIA Game24 event billed as a worldwide celebration of PC gaming.

With a new product stack comes an imminent refresh of the pricing and availability for previous generation cards. The GTX 980 and 970 will be available for $549 and $329, respectively, while the GTX 760 will drop into the $219 price range. NVIDIA further announced that the GTX 780 Ti, 780 and 770 are being discontinued. Looking back at the $700 launch price of the GTX 780 Ti, I am pleasantly surprised by the numbers above! If the performance of the GTX 980 lives to NVIDIA's claim of "world's fastest GPU", it will create a very interesting situation in the GPU market. Flagship cards from NVIDIA usually soar at a higher price point than the competition, however a quick look at the major e-tailer listings puts the GTX 980 straight in the R9 290X price bracket where most cards are in the $500-$600 range.

The full GM204 at the heart of the GTX 980 is equipped with four Graphics Processing Clusters, each having a dedicated raster engine and four Streaming Multiprocessors. The 16 Streaming Multiprocessors account for 128 CUDA cores each for a total of 2048. In terms of memory, the GTX 980 comes with 4096MB of GDDR5 RAM running on a 256-bit interface for a total 224 GB/s bandwidth.

The new GeForce GTX 980 GPU comes with exclusive graphics features that set it a step ahead of the previous generation. The all new NVIDIA Voxel Global Illumination (VXGI) is a perfect example of advanced technology that takes lighting effects to a whole new level of complexity with minimal performance hit. The VXGI technology allows game developers to integrate fully dynamic global illumination that do not require pre-calculations. Everything is done on the fly, resulting in superb lighting effects without frame rate loss. The VXGI technology will be available for Unreal Engine 4, with support for other major engines forthcoming.

Another interesting addition is the new Multi-Frame sampled AA (MFAA). This anti-aliasing mode basically combines multiple AA sample positions, resulting in superior graphics quality without penalising the performance, which is often the case with current 4xMSAA and higher AA modes. The visual experience is quite stunning, even though I can't provide screen shots in this review. You have to take my word for it and wait until NVIDIA provides an updated driver that supports this new feature. 

The next feature I will be touching on is the Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR). To put it simply, DSR is a brilliant process that works in a similar fashion to traditional downsampling and allows a 1080p monitor to display 4K quality graphics. DSR relies on a 13-tap Gaussian filter to convert the high resolution rendered output into the actual resolution of the available display. The DSR option will be accessible through the latest NVIDIA control panel, also in the GeForce Experience optimal settings list. The following screen shots from Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag will help get a better grasp at the graphics improvement. The first screen shot is using standard 4xMSAA, while the one below is the same AA level with DSR technology applied. The differences are clearly visible in the vegetation, ropes and overall texture quality.

Specifications:

Information courtesy of NVIDIA.