The GeForce 9-series has been released

And the reviews are in:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/n…gtx-980-review

Well, it's the current king, as expected. It's just in time too, as we've got quite a few sexy games to look forward in the coming months (DA: I, TW3 etc).

I expect the 970 to be the new king of price/performance, so the ball is now fully in AMDs court.

I'm unlikely to upgrade for two years at least. Just bought a laptop with a 760m in December 2013.

So I guess I'll be buying an 11-760m then

Very nice. If only MS would hurry up and finish Win 9 so I can buy a new laptop.

Not trying to be a smart-ass but it should say 900-series as the 9-series was released back in 2008. They were already available this morning so I went a head and bought a 980 GTX. I´m coming from a SLI setup featuring two 580 so I hadn't upgraded in 3-4 years.

Avoid this series, it's just more rebranding of the same old chips. Wait until they release new chips with a more efficient production process. TSMC has production problems so it will take a while.

What happened to the 800 series?

Originally Posted by JDR13
What happened to the 800 series?

They were only available in the mobile space.

Anandtech has a good review of it.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/n…gtx-980-review

Yep, chip architecture is practically the same… I'm content with my oc'd 670gtx, no reason for me to upgrade aside from a transient need for more VRAM.

I won't be upgrading for awhile yet. I'm pretty happy with my 7970m. Not the greatest card, but good enough for pretty much any game I throw at it. Guaranteed 30-60 FPS at max settings on most games I play…

Might be something to consider for TW3, unless that game will also require a CPU upgrade…. but I haven't met a CPU limited game like ever, unless you have a crazy graphics card and run at crazy FPS.

I try to keep abreast of technology and hardware, but I cant see that it would be worth it for me to exchange the 7950 in Xfire that I use at my resolution, 1080p (and have never had trouble with double cards).

But I think Nvidia actually are on the right track concerning the power envelope. Thats a good development. ( we all remember their industrial fan an heating systems.. ;-)

C

This new Maxwell architecture is really a nice accomplishment from Nvidia, delivering more performance with a less complex chip and lower power consumption is very promissing for the future. Imagine what they can do with this architecture and knowledge and a smaller procedure (20 nm), this could mean that laptop users (like me) are finally getting even closer to desktop graphics performance!

Originally Posted by Humanity has risen!
Avoid this series, it's just more rebranding of the same old chips. Wait until they release new chips with a more efficient production process. TSMC has production problems so it will take a while.

Originally Posted by Drithius
Yep, chip architecture is practically the same… I'm content with my oc'd 670gtx, no reason for me to upgrade aside from a transient need for more VRAM.

That's simply not true. The 980 uses Maxwell, not Kepler. Maxwell has only been used in a few cards so far, and in no top cards so far if I recall correctly. I think even GTX 780 Ti, the previous top card, used Kepler.

The next architecture is Pascal or some such thing, and is expected in 2016 or later. The next big jump is years away at this point.

Originally Posted by Toff
Anandtech has a good review of it.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/n…gtx-980-review

Yes, I know, that review is the reason for this thread, hence why it's linked in the original post.

Originally Posted by Drithius
Yep, chip architecture is practically the same… I'm content with my oc'd 670gtx, no reason for me to upgrade aside from a transient need for more VRAM.

Nooooo, very different… The new GPUs are awesome

The Maxwell chips are shoving like 2billion more transistors into the same space. They have FOUR times the L2 cashe (2MB!), use a fraction of the power of the last generation…

However, the feeling I get is very similar to when the 680 launched. What I said back then was "Nice tech, but show me the 384bit memory interface version."

So what we have in the 980 is about 2000 CUDA cores (~800 less than 780ti), 128 texture units as with the 680, then a bizarre 64 raster operators, which I thought were hardly used these days while the shader cores were playing a much bigger part with "next gen" mostly being having enough shader processing power to run Ambient Occlusion without a frame rate loss..

TL;DR
Great GPU on a shitty configured PCB;
Nvidia has gone to a lot of effort to not make the 980 too good.
Keep an eye out for the 384bit or even 512bit versions!

Originally Posted by SirJames
TL;DR
Great GPU on a shitty configured PCB
Nvidia has gone to a lot of effort to not make the 980 too good
Keep an eye out for the 384bit or even 512bit versions!

I doubt we'll see the same GPU with a different memory interface.

While I agree it's not a large performance jump from the 700 series, it's still a very attractive card. The 980 is $100 cheaper than the 780 GTX Ti while being 5%-10% faster, having more VRAM, and consuming less power.

Now I regret purchasing my 770 GTX 6 months ago. I really want that 980 GTX.

Originally Posted by JDR13
Now I regret purchasing my 770 GTX 6 months ago. I really want that 980 GTX.

Pretty sure I posted in that thread telling you to wait.

Originally Posted by JDR13
I doubt we'll see the same GPU with a different memory interface.

Maybe interface is not the right word…. Memory BUS might be more suitable. Let me try to explain my reasoning…

GTX 500 series
560 = 256bit (64bit * 4)
570 = 320bit (64*5)
580 = 384bit (64*6)
So the 580 uses 6x256MB ram chips to make its total 1536mb. I always like an even number of chips, but we'll get to that…


GTX 600 series
660 = 192bit (64*3)!?
670 = 256bit (64*4)
680 = 256bit (64*4) **My card! Hooray!**
TITAN = 384bit (64*6)
Perhaps here is where I should have spoken of "interface" as nvidias claim was they have some fancy way off utilizing memory so that they can make good use of an uneven number of ram chips. But note that the TITAN, not the 680, is the equivalent of the 580 "high end" card.
People who bought a TITAN paid the most in nvidias history for the high end card which was rationalized by the fact that it was going to be the most powerful card of the 700 series generation too.

GTX 700 series
760 = 256bit
770 = 256bit
780 = 384bit
780ti = 384bit
The 600 series Kepler chips proved so good that nvidia didn't even need to do a real new generation of cards and rebranded the 680 as a 770 while having the 780 actually come in behind the true high end 600 series card, the TITAN.

GTX 900 series
750 = 128bit
750ti = 128bit
960 = ???
970 = 256bit
980 = 256bit
980ti = ???
I'm including the 750 cards in the 900 series as they use the Maxwell architecture the 900 series uses.

So, it looks like we've seen the super low end cards and the mid range cards are out now. I reckon soon we'll see the high end 384bit card and low 960… HOWEVER the 960 might be too good and cut into the mid range sales so we won't get that budget beast option for a while.

I've been telling people to wait for this series for the last few months, as I expected Maxwell to be considerably better than Kepler (already knew that based on the mobile cards to be honest), but in early 2014 the 770 was still a great option.

As for beefed up versions: Yes, there will no doubt be a Ti or Titan or some such version. However, it would surprise me if it's released in 2014, as they usually release such cards to compete with whatever AMD is offering. Right now, the 980 is simply the king, so there's no reason for them to release a stronger version.

Speaking of which, when will AMD release their next series? I thought it was late 2014, but it seems to be mostly rumors at this point.

Not terribly impressed, to be honest. According to the two reviews I've seen, the 980 performs more or less like my 780 TI. In fact, one of them said the TI was still the fastest card around in most cases.

Good for me, I guess - and now I don't need to worry about upgrading for a while.

Originally Posted by SirJames
Maybe interface is not the right word…. Memory BUS might be more suitable. Let me try to explain my reasoning…

I understood what you were saying. However, they've started by releasing the high-end cards first in this series. They'll no doubt follow up with a 960, 950, etc. There might be a "Ti" version later, but based on past history, it'll probably just have a higher clocked GPU and VRAM.

It is disappointing that they stuck with a 256-bit memory bus though.