Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 Ti Xtreme Gaming Windforce Review
Gaming Benchmarks
Battlefield 4
Battlefield 4 may be one of the oldest games in our suite, but it can still bottleneck even the most modern graphics cards. Its workload is also good for weeding out unstable overclocks.
Gigabyte’s GTX 980 Ti Xtreme Gaming has no trouble with Battlefield at 2560x1440, and it maintains at least 71 FPS during our run. The reference GeForce GTX 980 Ti results were generated back in May. No doubt, Nvidia made some improvements to its software since then. But it appears that Gigabyte's claims of performance superiority may be legitimate.
The GTX 980 Ti Xtreme Gaming even manages to maintain playable frame rates at 3840x2160, staying north of 33 FPS. That's better than the reference model by an average of 6 FPS.
Curiously, while we didn't have any stability issues, our custom overclock yielded no benefit at either resolution.
Far Cry 4
Far Cry 4 is a much newer game, and it makes use of some Nvidia-exclusive enhancements to shadows and ambient occlusion, among other visual effects. Gigabyte's GTX 980 Ti Xtreme Gaming achieves respectable performance at 2560x1440. Its frame rate hovers around 90 FPS most of the time, only dipping as low as 75 FPS.
Our custom overclock again fails to impress.
That performance difference is even more evident at 4K. The reference card maintains just over 30 FPS, while the Xtreme Gaming keeps its nose in the 40s.
In Far Cry 4, a single GTX 980 Ti Xtreme Gaming is roughly on par with two overclocked GTX 970s in SLI.
Grand Theft Auto V
Grand Theft Auto V is an open-world game notorious for being hard on graphics hardware. There aren't many hardware configurations able to maintain smooth performance at the title's High preset, but Gigabyte's GTX 980 Ti Xtreme Edition has no trouble there. At 1440p, the minimum frame rates were in the high 60s, with the average sitting around 90 FPS. The reference card doesn't stand a chance.
Even with the resolution bumped up to 4K, minimum frame rates hover in the mid-30s with an average in the mid-40s. Our reference card averages 39 FPS, so once again, Gigabyte's implementation offers a significant improvement.
Our custom overclock again fails to deliver much of a gain. But at least performance isn't hurt this time around.
Metro: Last Light
Gigabyte's GTX 980 Ti is the first single-GPU card we've tested that averages around 100 FPS and never dips below 60 FPS at 2560x1440. The reference card averages 75 FPS, so the difference is pretty huge.
With the resolution increased to 4K, we're telling a similar story. The frame rate remains well above 30 FPS, again besting the reference model by a large margin.
Our custom overclock yields a slight performance boost at 1440p but proves little help at 4K.
Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor
Shadow of Mordor is another game that requires big graphics hardware for smooth performance at its highest detail settings. Gigabyte's GTX 980 Ti Xtreme Gaming doesn't dip under 70 FPS at 2560x1440.
With the resolution increased to 4K, the GTX 980 Ti Xtreme Gaming averages around 49 FPS, never falling under 35 FPS. In comparison, the reference GeForce GTX 980 Ti averages 38 FPS.
Once again, our overclock does little to improve on the factory configuration.
Tomb Raider
Tomb Raider is the only game in our suite that showed Gigabyte's 980 Ti dipping below 60 FPS at QHD. Though it averaged 100 FPS, we saw dips down to 55 FPS.
To compare, Nvidia's reference GeForce GTX 980 Ti delivers about 15 fewer frames per second on average.
Performance is quite good at 4K. Gigabyte's Xtreme Gaming card again outperforms the reference 980 Ti with an average frame rate that matches the other board's maximum.
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I picked up a 980 Ti last month and I love it, and I won't need a new card for several years now. There's a lot to be said about waiting, but you gotta take the plunge eventually.
The Nissan GTR puts less than 3 seconds from 0 to 60 using a twin turbo V6 and beats exotic cars using V10s that cost 2 to 3 times more.
Unless you're brand loyal or actually care about multi GPU issues, dismissing the 295 just because is a dual GPU card is weird in my eyes.
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I kinda missed the Fury X in there and nice showing by that 390X. Beating the 980 in a lot of tests. Too bad the consumption numbers are so bad.
Nice card none the less. I'll wait for the new batch of cards though to replace my lovely 7970Ghz.
Cheers!
Thats what happens when its going against two 290X's, but the 980 TI doesn't have to deal with micro stuttering, it uses a whole lot less power, and puts out less heat. But, the 295's were priced really nicely when they were readily available. I saw one new open box at microcenter for $495 a few months ago, and I didn't pick it up... I still kind of regret that, I had it in my literal hands and everything :-/.
The difference in this case is that we're having a massive die shrink for the first time in 4 years. Pascal and Polaris cards are likely to completely wreck the current cards in performance per watt, which could mean ridiculous performance gains as well. In this specific scenario, waiting is not a bad idea.
Im sure if it wasn't 6 months late it would have dominated the 980ti/R9 fury market segment. No rgb fans will stop people hoarding cash for pascal tho ...
A fair comparison would be to compare the 295 to 2 Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 Ti Xtreme Gaming in sli at 4k.
Waiting is a virtue they say and sometimes it really pays off. For example, remember the Titan X? $1,000 on launch and a $600 cards comes out two weeks later that's pretty much the same thing. $400 for doing nothing but waiting a measly two weeks probably paid off for those that waited.
nearly 3 months later actually.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-ti,4164.html
The GTX 980 Ti launched on May 31 2015.
It's been a long time, but the card is hardly getting long in the tooth.
Custom partner cards started coming out a few months ago, and admitedly, this review is a little late, the card is hardly irrelivent at this point.
We're still likely several months away from seeing Pascal in the market, and even when it launches, the first cards could be in the Titan X price range.
If you have the money now, and the need for a high end graphics card, there's no reason not to consider a 980Ti right now.
However, the lack of Fury X benches in this lineup is almost appalling, as it is the direct price-competitor to the 980 Ti.
I really wish I had a Fury X to compare it to.
The samples of those cards have been very hard to get our hands on, and without partners having the ability to change the design in any way, we can't even do a custom board review to compare.
Props to nVidia though for doing it efficiently and on air.
Maybe you have never owned a dual gpu setup then? Sure it may bench well on the few tests in tom's suite, but there will be one or two games that you really want to enjoy, only to find out they either scale poorly with dual gpu, have stuttering or fps dips to lower lows than an adequate single card, late dual gpu support with patches or it never gets dual gpu support and the game only plays well with one gpu disabled. You also don't get double the vram by adding a second card/gpu, each gpu must have its own ram. I have owned a crossfire and sli setup and had all the fore-mentioned problems. So......I am totally weird for not wanting these problems..........
The game changer is die shrink and high bandwidth memory on the GPU, we do not want the same rehashed chips with just more juice pumped through them. We need less heat. smaller PCBs, and higher speeds. The R9 fury is a right step in that direction with its speed and size, NVidia needs to get on board.
On the other hand, though, it's kinda sad to see Nvidia be so conservative when they could be clearly delivering a better product. I mean, practically every 970 can run at 1300MHz, even though the official boost clock is under 1200MHz. It makes you wonder what kind of a beast we could have if they decided to throw power restrictions out the window and release a 500W monster with liquid cooling like AMD did.
It is exceedingly worth noting this card was released November 11th of last year, while this review comes in 3 months late.
While thats not a long time, it was before people began recommending the wait for pascal.
No doubt we'll see a Titan successor and genuine big-Pascal GPU released at some stage, but I suspect it'll be much later. There was almost 9 months between 980 and 980ti.