For the last few weeks, the internet’s been abuzz about AMD’s upcoming flagship GPU—a single-GPU card built to take on Nvidia’s Titan X , but at a presumably lower price. With today’s launch of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, Nvidia’s clearly making a preemptive strike against AMD, as you get a card just as fast as the Titan X…but for $650.

All New Design

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Performance and Benchmarks

<em>The Titan X's 12GB of memory is overkill, so the GTX 980 Ti has a more reasonable 6GB clocked at 7GHz on a 384-bit wide bus.</em>

If that weren’t enough to grab attention, Nvidia’s also throwing in a copy of Batman: Arkham Knight with each 980 Ti, as well as reducing the price of last September’s GTX 980 to $500. It’s safe to say the gloves are off. (Holy moly are they off.) And benefiting from this brutal slugfest are all PC gamers who’ve been waiting to upgrade.Spoiler: this section’s headline is actually a joke. The GTX 980 Ti (shown here in reference form) is based on the same “Big Maxwell” GM200 architecture found in its $1,000 Titan X, which launched this year in March. It uses the same cooling mechanism we've seen before on the previous Kepler and Maxwell cards, and supports all the same features as the GTX 980 and the Titan X . So there’s nothing new here, except for the fact this GPU is a slightly neutered Titan X.Before we get into the discussion of the GTX 980 Ti, let's first have a look at everyone's best friend, the spec chart, so we can see all the cards' numbers side-by-side.As you can see from the chart, the GTX 980 Ti is essentially a Titan X with only two streaming multiprocessor units disabled and half the memory. The biggest difference in specs between the two flagship cards is the Titan X has 3,072 CUDA cores (shader processors), and the GTX 980 Ti has 2,816. The 980 Ti’s clock speeds, memory speed, and memory bus width remain exactly the same as the Titan X, so naturally the two cards have the exact same memory bandwidth specification of 336.5GB/s. It does have half the memory of the Titan X at 6GB, but that shouldn’t matter too much—even people with 4K monitors can't generally use more than 6GB of memory. For now, this GPU is sufficient to run games at 4K with high detail at great framerates.One area in which the 980 Ti is actually better than the Titan X, though, is that it’ll be offered by all of Nvidia’s partners in a variety of cooling solutions and configurations—so we should see some pretty sweet aftermarket coolers on this puppy.As for how the 980 Ti holds up against Nvidia’s other offerings, Nvidia is promoting its new GPU as having 38% more cores and texture units, and 50% more memory bandwidth than the standard 980. It’s also saying that the GTX 980 Ti is 300% faster than the Kepler-based GTX 680, and up to 65% faster than the Kepler-based GTX 780 Ti. All marketing aside, none of this should sound revelatory—after all, as we’ve just established, this is basically the Titan X with a bit of trimming.

There’s not a whole lot to say about this Maxwell GPU that hasn’t already been mentioned in previous reviews. Like the 980 and the Titan X, it supports G-Sync monitors, GeForce Experience, Shield streaming, etc., and since it’s essentially the Titan X in all the important ways, the hardware doesn’t hold any surprises, either. So, without any further ado, let's take a look at how this card runs.

3DMark GTX 980 Ti GTX Titan X GTX 980 GTX 780 Ti Radeon R9 290X Radeon R9 295X2 3Dmark Firestrike 14,081 14,210 11,377 9,749 10,056 15,833 3Dmark Firestrike Extreme 7,370 7,558 5,864 4,838 5,041 8,753 3Dmark Firestrike Ultra 3,943 4,124 3,150 2,432 2,704 4,888

1920x1080 (Ultra Settings, 4XAA) GTX 980 Ti GTX Titan X GTX 980 GTX 780 Ti Radeon R9 290X Radeon R9 295X2 Batman: Arkham Origins 86 87 75 72 89 113 Heaven 4.0 98.2 99.18 75.6 69.4 61.2 60.4 Hitman: Absolution 88.62 88.69 71.62 69.35 61.38 71.5 Metro: Last Light 57.5 58 48 49.5 32 48.47 Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor 103 101.65 81.18 73.44 76.59 103.82 Tomb Raider 70.8 72.9 55.4 47.8 47.5 86

2560x1440 (Ultra Settings, 4XAA) GTX 980 Ti GTX Titan X GTX 980 GTX 780 Ti Radeon R9 290X Radeon R9 295X2 Batman: Arkham Origins 70 71 57 55 70 79 Heaven 4.0 61.8 63.4 45.7 44 38 37.2 Hitman: Absolution 62.93 63.09 48.03 49.93 54.07 72.11 Metro: Last Light 37.33 37.5 30.67 29 21 34.5 Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor 75.97 77.3 59.15 52.32 54.55 84.62 Tomb Raider 44 45.7 33.7 29 30 57

3840x2160 (Ultra settings, No AA) GTX 980 Ti GTX Titan X GTX 980 GTX 780 Ti Radeon R9 290X Radeon R9 295X2 Batman: Arkham Origins 59 57 55 53 51 72 Heaven 4.0 31.5 32.6 28 23.8 19 32.8 Hitman: Absolution 59.6 57.34 45.81 43.38 42.99 70.9 Metro: Last Light 34 34 28 20 19 31.5 Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor 40.66 41.69 30.95 27.09 21.58 55.38 Tomb Raider 42.5 45.2 33.2 28.7 28.8 54.7

<em>Outputs include HDMI, DVI, and three DisplayPort connectors, the last of which is required for 4K gaming at 60Hz.</em>

Heat, Noise, and Overclocking

We tested the GTX 980 Ti against all of its closest competitors at three resolutions: 1920x1080, 2560x1440, and of course, 3840x2160. For the tests at the lower resolutions we cranked up every setting to the absolute maximum, and turned anti-aliasing up to 4XAA. For the benchmarks at 4K though, we turned off AA as it’s not really necessary at that resolution.(Note: Our second GTX 980 was unavailable for running 980 SLI benchmarks, so if you'd like a rough idea of how that configuration performs against the 980 Ti, you can refer to our Titan X article's benchmarks .)All tests were run on our test bench running an Asus Z97-A motherboard, Intel Core i7-4790k motherboard, 16GB of DDR3/1600 memory, 240GB Crucial M500 SSD, 1000W Corsair PSU, and Windows 8.1. All tests at 1920x1080 and 2560x1440 were run at maximum graphical settings with 4XAA enabled. Tests at 3840x2160 did not have AA enabled.As you can see by the benchmark charts, the difference in performance between the GTX 980 Ti and the Titan X is so small it could be chalked up to just standard deviation in the tests. They are literally within one frame per second on some tests, and the biggest delta is about three frames per second, so for all intents and purposes, we declare the GTX 980 Ti to perform the same as the Titan X. That it costs $350 less is mind-blowing.When comparing the 980 Ti to the GTX 980, which uses a smaller GPU and has a much lower TDP (250W for the 980 Ti versus 165W for the 980), the performance delta is surprisingly large, hovering between 15 and 25 percent. That’s pretty huge and what we normally see between cards in different levels of the product stack, like the 970 to 960, but this is between two cards in the same number family. So it's a bit of an anomaly, but in a good way.When compared to the GTX 780 Ti, the delta is even bigger, reaching up to 40% in some titles, and at 4K it is over 50% in Metro: Last Light. That's a massive difference, and could be the biggest jump we’ve ever seen from one generation of cards to the next, despite the fact that both cards are manufactured on a 28nm process.Like all the Maxwell cards, the GTX 980 Ti is fairly quiet. We used EVGA’s PrecisionX utility to allow the temperature ceiling to run as high as it wanted, but it never got hotter than 83°C under full load.As far as overclocking goes, the 980 Ti is just as overclockable as all the other Maxwell family cards. That is to say, you can overclock the pants off of it. We were able to get our GTX 980 Ti review sample up to around 1406MHz before things went sideways, which is par for the course and what we expected from a Maxwell card. You should be able to go at least 100MHz beyond the official Boost Clock of 1075MHz quite easily.