Maxwell is here! The GTX 980 Review

The much awaited GTX 980 GPU is here! With the new Maxwell architecture, the GTX-980 is the best gaming graphics card on the market!

The GeForce GTX 980 is our fastest and most efficient GPU. Faster framerates, new rendering techniques and superior image quality combine to deliver next-generation game experiences at Ultra HD resolutions and on Virtual Reality headsets.

See the ‘Journey of Maxwell’ here:

Reviews of the GTX-980:

Anandtech: 

…the GeForce GTX 980 represents another stellar performance from NVIDIA. Their reign at the top is not going to go unchallenged – AMD can’t match NVIDIA on performance, but they can sure drive down prices – but as was the case in 2012 the crown continues to securely reside in NVIDIA’s hands, and once again they have done the technical hard work to earn it.

NVIDIA GPU Specification Comparison
GTX 980 GTX 970 (Corrected) GTX 780 Ti GTX 770
CUDA Cores 2048 1664 2880 1536
Texture Units 128 104 240 128
ROPs 64 56 48 32
Core Clock 1126MHz 1050MHz 875MHz 1046MHz
Boost Clock 1216MHz 1178MHz 928Mhz 1085MHz
Memory Clock 7GHz GDDR5 7GHz GDDR5 7GHz GDDR5 7GHz GDDR5
Memory Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit 384-bit 256-bit
VRAM 4GB 4GB 3GB 2GB
FP64 1/32 FP32 1/32 FP32 1/24 FP32 1/24 FP32
TDP 165W 145W 250W 230W
GPU GM204 GM204 GK110 GK104
Transistor Count 5.2B 5.2B 7.1B 3.5B
Manufacturing Process TSMC 28nm TSMC 28nm TSMC 28nm TSMC 28nm
Launch Date 09/18/14 09/18/14 11/07/13 05/30/13
Launch Price $549 $329 $699 $399

Hardware Canucks:

…Much of the GM204’s stated improvements stem from its ability to reach extremely high clock frequencies which are a direct result of the core’s incredibly low TDP overhead. Even though the GTX 980 can hit over 1200MHz on a regular basis and the GTX 970 isn’t far behind at 1085MHz, their TDPs are only are only 165W and 145W respectively. Yes you read that right: these new cards are, in a broad sense, nearly 100W more efficient than their predecessors. That leads to a much cooler-running, less power hungry system. We can almost hear the ITX crowd rejoicing now….

 Hard OCP:

4K performance is not bottlenecked on the GeForce GTX 980. For the most part it is faster than the GeForce GTX 780 Ti and Radeon R9 290X. There are some games where it will break even on performance to 780 Ti.

TweakTown (SLI):

For the 28nm process, NVIDIA has squeezed an incredible amount of performance out of it, all while using less power – something that normally never happens. The power consumption usually comes included with a process shrink, but this isn’t happening here. NVIDIA has moulded the best of both world’s: Tegra and GeForce, to provide Maxwell – the most impressive GPU to date.

To find out more about the GTX-980, Button