Another day, another new graphics card.
Welcome to the Lionus Tech Tips performance overview of the GTX 980 from
NVIDIA, their most advanced GPU
yet. DKL's new Rip Jaws 4 series is
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more. As usual, we'll start with the unboxing and physical overview. The
Media Sample GTX 980s come packaged in this sweet box that has the card upright
looking all majestic with its magnesium alloy fan housing, aluminum frame, and
trivalent chromium plating with H.
What's that? Sorry, you've seen this user
configurable green LED lit GeForce logo before. NVIDIA hasn't really changed
their cooler design since the 690. Ah, yes. No, I can see how you might think
that, but you haven't seen the back yet. Check it out. Now, we get a full metal
back plate with a classy looking design and surface. Now, the issue with back
plates, and presumably the reason NVIDIA has never done a reference card with one
before, is that it restricts the intake of a card installed in the next slot
over in tightly packed SLI configurations. So NVIDIA made this
strategic chunk of the back plate removable for users with lots of cards
right next to each other in SLI. Not that you need to run SLI just to hook up
enough monitors anymore. As we move over to the IO, yeah, that's some pretty good
stuff right there. Three DisplayPort ports, so that's up to three G-Sync
displays off of a single card. An HDMI
2.0 port. So yeah, that's 4K 60 Hz over
HDMI. and a dual link DVI port can all
be found here. Any four of which can be used at one time on this beast of a
graphics card. Which leads us to the next notable thing physically. This is a
flagship 80 class card, but like the GTX
680, it only has two six pin connectors.
A hint at the incredible power efficiency of the Maxwell architecture
at the core of the GM 204 chip that powers this card. The GTX 980 not only
hung around at the top of our performance charts, but did it while
consuming less power than GK 110based
cards like the 780 and 780 Ti and while
running extremely quietly. So, let's talk about Maxwell for a bit here.
Without shrinking the manufacturing process, so they're still on the same
28nmter node that they used to build the Kepler based GTX 680, NVIDIA has
effectively reduced TDP by 30 W,
increased the number of CUDA cores by 33%, increased base clocks and memory
speed by around 12% and doubled the number of render output units, as well
as adding some other cool hardware bits to enable some really cool technology.
Pretty amazing, actually. So, first up in the new technology list is their
improved third generation delta color compression. A technique that allows
data coming out of the core to be compressed by a factor of 2:1, 4:1, or
even 8:1 before being committed to memory by storing the value of a change
versus the previous frame rather than the value itself. This combined with
improved caching allows the GTX 980, in spite of its mere 256-bit memory
interface, to achieve up to around 30%
better effective memory performance compared to the GTX 680. In this scene,
the pink highlighted screen elements are taking advantage of this technology.
Next up is a feature that's all about getting the most out of older games
where you have lots of GPU horsepower to spare. DSR or dynamic super
resolution is mostly just another name for a feature that has existed forever
but is now easier to use. Super sampling
anti-aliasing. The way it works is it renders the scene at a higher
resolution. So you can choose 2x, 3x, or 4x in the control panel. Then
intelligently downscales it with a filter whose sharpness or softness can
be adjusted to let you use your extra GPU horsepower that otherwise was just
sitting there to yield potentially a much more pleasing gaming experience.
It's not the same as actually running on a 4K display, but it's much better than
running native 1080p. The effect is especially noticeable on the grass in
Dark Souls II here in this footage that I took at the NVIDIA event. The next
feature is about getting more performance when we don't have enough,
and it's called MFAA or frame
anti-aliasing. That's short for multi-frame sampled anti-aliasing. Grow
up. The way this works is instead of taking a large number of samples with a
static pattern to smooth the edges of on-screen objects or textures, MFAA
takes fewer samples per frame, half as many from what we've been told, but uses
new hardware in the GTX 980 and 970 to
alternate the positions with each frame. Then it applies a clever filter. So the
performance impact is about equivalent to two times MSAA, but the resulting
image looks pretty much identical to four times MSAA. This feature isn't
enabled in the driver yet, so expect an update once we get a chance to play
around with it some more, but the initial results are impressive. Check
out the effect on the transparent textures like these wires in this
Battlefield 4 demo that NVIDIA was showing off at the launch event. Another
thing we won't be able to test for a while is the improvements that NVIDIA
has been making to the VR experience on their cards. The most notable of which
is called auto asynchronous warp. A
cheat, I guess, that allows the head tracking of a VR headset like the Oculus
Rift to sample its position again right
before a frame is finished being drawn to reduce the player's perception of the
delay between physical motion and on-screen motion. And this will be
important for folks who have trouble with motion sickness in VR. Which leads
us to the final feature, their VxGI global illumination technique that we
also can't really test here because while Unreal Engine 4 is getting
support, it'll be a while before we get real games with the tech, but it looks
so freaking cool. NVIDIA has a couple of demos to show it off. One where they
render a Cornell box, so you can see the way the direct light enters at the top,
so the tops of the shapes are the brightest with realistic soft shadows and color bleeding from reflective
surfaces. and one where they recreated as closely as possible the conditions of
this iconic photo from the 1969 lunar landing to demonstrate that it's
completely realistic and wasn't taken
somewhere in Area 51 or whatever. Now, these two demos wouldn't be impressive
at all except that they're being done in real time instead of using path tracing,
a phenomenally computationally intensive global illumination technique that
involves following light rays as they bounce around the scene. like all of
them. NVIDIA is using dedicated hardware to split the scene into cubes called
voxels that act as dynamic light sources
that approximate the results of a more accurate rayraced rendering method but
in real time. All right, so as cool as
all that technology is, how does the
card actually perform? That's what you want to know. Great question, Luke. Take
it away. Before we get into things, I want to point out that overclocking all
of our cards is yet again backed by popular demand. And because of that, you
will be able to find the overclocking results and settings in the graphics
card overclocking dock, which should be linked in the description below this
video. Also, when reading the settings for the GTX 980 in the overclocking dock
below, there's no reason to worry. There is a reason why I ignore the memory
clock speed. The 980, much like the 780 Ti before it, features a fantastic
technology called autobalancing power rails, which in its most basic
description, allows the card to take extra power overhead from parts of the
card that aren't using it and move it elsewhere, allowing you to focus on one
specific thing, which in this case resulted in the GPU clock speed being
cranked through the freaking roof, which is awesome because then you can access
all of that FPS that you wouldn't otherwise be able to. Performance of the
GTX 980 is honestly a little bit surprising in a good way. To give proper
context for that statement, we have to look at the rumor mill. Personally, I like to avoid rumors, but sometimes I
don't really have a choice. For instance, on the September 12th version
of the WAN Show, my brother at Cold SE on Twitter, and I discussed how the 980
was, according to rumors, not supposed to beat out the 780 Ti. So, when I
finally got the card in hand, I was delighted to see that more often than not, it was able to beat the 780 Ti in
both 1080p and 4K benchmarks. Now, my
overclock for the 980 feels a little bit high, running at a range of 1503 to 1492
MHz, but I really have no idea as I have
no one else's overclocks to compare to yet. And to be fair, my 780 Ti overclock
is very aggressive anyways. So, I haven't exactly done the 980 any favors
in regards to the 780 Ti's clock speed.
But don't forget, all of this performance awesomeness doesn't just
stand on its own. Not only are you paying considerably less for this card
than you would pay for a 780 Ti, but you also pay less in the future. Underload,
the 980 has considerably less power draw than the 780 Ti, which is nice if you're
actually paying for your power bill. And if you're not paying for your power
bill, maybe you can use that little tidbit of information to convince your parents that it might be time for an
upgrade. Anyways, thanks for watching my segment, guys. Back to you, Linus.
Thanks, Luke. All right, guys. So, you've seen the results and you've seen
the pricing. Links as always in the video description for pricing. So, let
us know what you think. For non-overclockers, as I'm sure you'll
have noticed from the other reviews around the web, GTX 980 is a total tank.
But when overclocking the GTX 780 Ti, we
observed that this older GK 1110-based
card becomes much more competitive if you're willing to sacrifice features and
power consumption. So, let us know what you think. If you had over 500 bucks to
spend on a graphics card, which one would get your money? Also, let us know
in the comments what other coverage you'd like to see of this card. An
overclocking guide, um, SLI performance scaling. Any other ideas? let us know.
Thanks for watching, guys. Like this video if you liked it. Dislike it if you
disliked it. You can also leave a comment if you have feelings that are just more complicated than this. Also,
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