HiGame

Today, at Computex (It’s already 6 AM on June 1 in Taiwan), Nvidia is launching its next high-end GPU. Just as the GTX 780 followed the original Titan, the GTX 980 Ti will slide in between the Titan X and the upper-end “standard” consumer card, the GTX 980. This new card is based on the same GM200 GPU as the Titan X, but trims the VRAM buffer down to 6GB, from Titan X’s 12GB. The cooler design is outwardly identical to the shroud and fan that Nvidia has deployed since it first unveiled the GTX Titan.



Overall, the GTX 980 Ti is a very modest step down from what the Titan X offers. It has 22 SM clusters as opposed to Titan X’s 24, for a total of 2816 GPU cores*(a roughly 9% reduction). Trim the texture units by the same ratio (176 as opposed to 192) and keep the total number of ROPS the same (96). Then cut the RAM in half, for a total of 6GB, down from 12GB, and voila — you have the GTX 980 Ti.



The memory clock, base clock, and boost clock on the 980 Ti are all identical to Titan X, as is its pixel fill rate. Texture rate is down slightly, thanks to the decreased number of texture mapping units. Both chips have a 384-bit memory bus. Nvidia has promised that the 980 Ti has full access to its memory pool, and that overall GPU memory bandwidth should be in-line with Titan X. We see no evidence of any memory-related issues, and the 6GB memory buffer on the card give the chip room to breathe in any case.

On paper, the GTX 980 Ti packs virtually all of the Titan X’s punch into a much lower $649 price.

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