980 Ti

personally I prefer the 600USD range.
1200USD is the maximum I want to spend for gaming and two GTX980 performs better than any other single card equivalent.
just my two cents.
 
Factum said:
Not again...the GTX970 has 4GB of RAM, not 3.5...just stop it...you look silly.
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By the logic of people defending Nvidia's false advertising, AMD could put 4gb of VRAM on a card in such a way that only 1gb can be used simultaneously, then label/advertise it as a card with 4gb. There's still 4gb on the card, it's just the card can only use 1gb at a time, cycling through which parts it uses.
 
The 970 does have 4 GB of VRAM on the board though, go check the pictures for yourself.
I believe the issue is bus-related which sounds much less troublesome. Big numbers are confusing!

See, you have to be specific with these people.
 
I thought it was pretty obvious when people say the 970 has 3.5GB of VRAM they realize it technically has 4GB but only 3.5 is at a useful speed. IIRC [H] mentioned something in their GTA V SLI review about it hurting the 970s.
 
They could put 100 GB of memory on the card but if it all runs at 0 GB/s then it's completely useless.
 
sblantipodi said:
it says that 500MB are not fast as the remaining 3.5GB, this does not means that the cards has 3.5GB of VRAM.
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Which they achieved by NOT increasing the speed of 3.5gb past the standard of other cards, but by decreasing the speed of 512mb BELOW the standard. The card does not have 4gb of standard speed memory. That's why once the VRAM usage goes above 3.5gb, the card becomes slower than the 290/290x in many games. And Nvidia advertises the card as if it had 4gb of standard speed memory, without indicating that 512mb is slower than the other 3.5gb. Call it whatever you like, it is still a gimped, overpriced card because they cheaped out on that part of the design while still pricing the card as if they had not cheaped out there.

Back in 2011, I got the second-best AMD card available (hd6950), their top sub-flagship, only slightly slower than the flagship 6970. I got a high-end model with excellent temperature/noise-reduction. Furthermore, the VRAM standard at the time was still 1GB. There was not a single game on the market that took advantage of more than 1GB vram at max quality settings on 1080p. And what did I get? Because of mods I was using in Fallout New Vegas, I got a 2gb card, twice the VRAM used by any of the latest games. How much did I pay for all of that? $290, and it did not require mail-in rebates for that price.

Now 4GB is standard for 1080p max quality settings on the latest games, and you are going to need more than that if a high-end game came out with heavy modding support, which unfortunately is becoming an extremely rare event.
 
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GearChoices said:
Which they achieved by NOT increasing the speed of 3.5gb past the standard of other cards, but by decreasing the speed of 512mb BELOW the standard. The card does not have 4gb of standard speed memory. That's why once the VRAM usage goes above 3.5gb, the card becomes slower than the 290/290x in many games. And Nvidia advertises the card as if it had 4gb of standard speed memory, without indicating that 512mb is slower than the other 3.5gb. Call it whatever you like, it is still a gimped, overpriced card because they cheaped out on that part of the design while still pricing the card as if they had not cheaped out there.
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They did not cheap out. The 970 is a 980 that failed component validation so components of the chip are disabled, in this case one of those is part of the memory controller. They could've went with 3GB VRAM but decided instead to have a shared memory controller for the last portion, allowing for 4GB RAM even though the last 500 MB is slower. Yes, the card has actual, physical 4GB RAM that is exactly the same as the 980. It just doesn't have the same memory controller setup.

Nvidia has improved the performance of that last portion with drivers but depending on the game the drivers try to keep VRAM at 3.5 GB. Some go over about 100-200 MB without issues but to push the full 4GB VRAM use you need 4K resolution at which point the 970 (even in SLI) is not a good match in the first place.

While Nvidia were very shady bastards by not describing the shared memory from the start, the cards still perform fine. The 970 is about 200 euros cheaper than the 980 so it's still a pretty good deal considering most of the time when overclocked it can reach similar performance levels. It's a great budget-conscious choice for 1080p or 1440p and even in SLI almost half the price of an equivalent 980 SLI (or single Titan X) setup.

I've been gaming on 970 SLI in 1440p from the start of the year and Shadow of Mordor at ultra textures was the only game giving me issues at 1440p. After installing 16 GB RAM (previously had 8) those issues largely went away. As I've said in other threads, SoM is a memory hog and the developer recommendation of 6 GB VRAM is not out of whack.

Anyway, 970 is not the subject of the thread.
 
Jay just teased what I think might be the 980ti on Tech Talk

xm2qFtU.png
 
No, that's definitely a 980 Ti, I can tell by the angle of the fan blades in the cooler which are slightly different from any known Nvidia model!
 
Cr4ckm0nk3y said:
Was it tonights live stream when they were talking about proprietary tech? If so I believe it was a Titan X.
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He also had a Titan X he was flashing. He made it a point to make sure people differentiated the two, so...
 
If I were betting I would say that the card Jay held up is a 780Ti.

Kind of strange that from that angle the heat-sink fins are not visible though.
 
NVIDIA is ready with a new high-end graphics card that will be slotted between the GeForce GTX 980 and the GeForce GTX TITAN-X, in its product stack. The GeForce GTX 980 Ti, as it's being called, will launch within the next couple of weeks, and will be based on the company's GM200 silicon. The core-configuration of this chip remains unknown, but it is rumored to feature 6 GB of GDDR5 memory, half that of the GTX TITAN-X, across its 384-bit wide memory bus.


http://www.techpowerup.com/212791/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-ti-launch-imminent.html
 
Without starting a flame war. Looking at the diagram is this going to be an actual 6 GB or is it going to be 5.5 GB because of the lower effective ROP count?
 
Supermr2 said:
Without starting a flame war. Looking at the diagram is this going to be an actual 6 GB or is it going to be 5.5 GB because of the lower effective ROP count?
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I imagine 6GB, but only performing optimally when using 5.5GB or less ... after 5.5GB there will be a noticeable performance drop while attempting to access the additional memory addresses
 
Why would that be the case? The issue with the 979 vs 980 was that they both have the same amount of RAM. Since this is half the Titan X RAM, there should no reason for 5.5 as the complete addressable space is 12GB not 6GB.
 
Cyph said:
Why would that be the case? The issue with the 979 vs 980 was that they both have the same amount of RAM. Since this is half the Titan X RAM, there should no reason for 5.5 as the complete addressable space is 12GB not 6GB.
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After the last shitstorm, Nvidia definitely would not make the same mistake twice... Not this early, anyway.
 
Cyph said:
Why would that be the case? The issue with the 979 vs 980 was that they both have the same amount of RAM. Since this is half the Titan X RAM, there should no reason for 5.5 as the complete addressable space is 12GB not 6GB.
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Yes they are halving the VRAM amount but they are still keeping the same amount of memory controllers.

So Nvidia has two choices, keep the same amount of ROPs as the Titan X, or cut a ROP/L2 partition(or 2) and pull the same stunt.

If they are only cutting 2SMMs and keep everything else the same, there will not be any significant performance delta between the two, GTX980Ti and Titan X.
 
LordEC911 said:
Yes they are halving the VRAM amount but they are still keeping the same amount of memory controllers.

So Nvidia has two choices, keep the same amount of ROPs as the Titan X, or cut a ROP/L2 partition(or 2) and pull the same stunt.

If they are only cutting 2SMMs and keep everything else the same, there will not be any significant performance delta between the two, GTX980Ti and Titan X.
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I don't think they would pull a 970 again. If the bus is lowered and not all the ram runs at full speed I think they will disclose that.

It will be interesting to see what they do.
 
erek said:
I imagine 6GB, but only performing optimally when using 5.5GB or less ... after 5.5GB there will be a noticeable performance drop while attempting to access the additional memory addresses
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Even if that was the case, the real world impact would be so minimal and obscure that you'd need to be actively unlucky to precisely hit that spot.
 
They better not pull that same crap - it'll be answered very quickly by the reviewers. The whole point of waiting out the release of the 980ti vs buying a Titan-X 2 months ago was to be able to use ALL 6GB, for 100% of the 980ti buyers...
 
chenw said:
Even if that was the case, the real world impact would be so minimal and obscure that you'd need to be actively unlucky to precisely hit that spot.
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4k and sli would hit that spot all day long I think.
 
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