Nvidia GTX 980 is the best performance Graphic Card out now in the market when we talk about the price that it offers right out with the launch price. On medium settings, the GTX 980 is the best performing card right now when compared to the other graphic cards which are available out.
When computing the benchmarks of Nvidia GTX 980, then we can say it dealing in a great way and even there is a golden spark at this card when compared to the AMD’s cards which were almost ruling out on performance. Nvidia GTX 980 is the best graphic card right now at the performance ratio that we match with other graphic card. When the GTX 980 was tested out on the ultra settings, it gave us the performance number which was more appealing and this point we can say that the Nvidia GTX 980 also went against the Nvidia GTX 780 Ti.
Maxwell architecture did real good when it compares to the Kepler architecture which was the older generation architecture for Nvidia Graphic Cards. Maxwell Architecture gives you less Cuda Cores, consumes less wattage, requires less area, also consumes less number of transistors but perform the same when compared to the Kepler architecture. But still performs better in gaming and as well as computational benchmarks. Nvidia did a good job producing the newer architecture graphic card to improve the GPU range with less amount of money to spend and get the same performance at lower prices.
But according to a survey that under goes the number of gamers that steam users have are using Nvidia 600 Graphic Cards which are the older generation cards. As Nvidia aims those users who wants to upgrade to the 700 series cards, so it would be better choice for them to buy the new gen 900 series Maxwell cards. The Maxwell Cards could be making it up to 900 series as it was about to encounter in the same 800 series but the newer gen Maxwell will come under the 900 series naming scheme.
New Generation Architecture:
When the older gen graphic cards are compared to the newer generations by picking out the architecture especially talking about the Fermi and Kepler, then you would noticed that the Maxwell GPU’s are made with the bunch of Graphics Processing Clusters (GPCs), Memory Controllers and Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs). The Nvidia GTX 750 Ti were announced with the GM107 Maxwell SM where the inbuilt structure was partitioned up in to the 4 processing blocks where it has its own scheduler, 32 Cuda Cores and the instruction buffer.
This makes it to reduce the computational overhead that helps to save power with reducing communication latency. The GM107 was the 1st generation for the Maxwell architecture and the GM204 is the 2nd generation. The GM204 has four GPC’s when compared to the GM107. In the Maxwell architecture, GM204 has 4 GPC and in each GPC there is four SMM’s and the GM204 has 4 memory controllers. That equals to 16 SMM’s on GM204 and there are 16 ROP’s on 1 partition so that comes to 64 ROP’s. Nvidia GTX 780, 780 Ti and GTX Titan have 48 ROP’s.
The Nvidia GTX 980 has all the components in the perfect working state that makes it the complete GM204 on the Graphic card. Soon now, Nvidia is going to launch the GTX 960 and GTX 960 Ti with the 10-11 SMM’s. The Nvidia GTX 970 has 13 SMM’s and the graphic card is already out in the market.
There is a bit of the difference in the SM of GM107 and GM204 and that is the PloyMorph Engine 3.0. This makes it quite performance unveiling on the tessellation. When compared to the GTX 680, the PolyMorph Engine which is present in the newer Maxwell graphic cards is more than the older Kepler gen graphic cards and there are twice numbers of PolyMorph Engine on the 900 series cards as the total reorganized structure of the newer designed Maxwell architecture. This will improve the tessellation as well as computational performance.
Coming on to the memory part, GM204 has a bus width of 256-bit with 7Gbps GDDR5 memory that makes the 224 GB/sec memory bandwidth. The GTX 780 Ti has 336 GB/sec memory bandwidth and when compared to the 224GB/sec, the memory interface is quite higher on the GTX 780 Ti. But the newer architecture gives some improvements in caching and compressions which gave a rise to 25% less bytes per frame and that means the newer architecture can have more data transfer rate. For Example; the 7 Gbps on the newer Maxwell architecture comes near to the Kepler’s 9.3 Gbps.
The latest DisplayPort standard is 1.3 which can support up to 5K displays with RGB and also could support 8K display with subsampling, but the GTX 980 didn’t had the new standard and that was a bit for a concern. Although the GTX 980 has a HDMI 2.0 Port that has a support for 4K at 60 frames per second. The GTX 980 can give an output of 5120 x 3200 pixel resolution at 60Hz refresh rate which is more than the 5K display. The GM204 has improved the support for video codec and now the newer architecture GM204 has support for H.265 that will allow the total throughput by 2.5 times and would also pay the 4K encoding.
Hardware Build:
The Nvidia GTX 980 has the GTX 980 engraving on the housing near the mounting bracket and that is what it tells us the difference between the old and the new generation. This card is built with the amazing hardware materials that sound real unusual that is the magnesium alloy with powder coated aluminium and the trivalent chromium plating. The back of the card is now protected by the company just to hide the SMD components on the back of the graphic card. There’s a notch to open the sliding two piece back plate that can be removed to commit the air flow from the crevice when you connect another card for SLI.
The GTX 980 has not been improved and the stock cooler design originally came with GTX 690. Since then the design has been following the same concept of cooling. The GTX Titan Z and the GTX Titan Black has the black powder coated fins on the heatsink and the GTX 980 is following the same and there is no difference between them. There are some changes on the I/O ports of the new GTX 980 card. This time we have 1 HDMI, 1 DVI and 3 Display Ports. On the older cards there were 2 DVI, 1 HDMI and 1 Display port. The ventilation has been improved as they have widened the vent grills o make more room for air flow. For improved power efficiency, Nvidia GTX 980 has 2 six pins power connectors.
