Nvidia announces GTX 970 and 980

Nvidia announced two new video cards on Friday morning, the GTX 970 and 980. Both video cards have a GPU that is based on the Maxwell architecture and is baked at 28nm. The new GPUs have a significantly lower TDP than their predecessors.

Nvidia first showed Maxwell in the midrange video cards GTX 750 and 750 Ti. The GTX 970 and 980 are the first high-end graphics cards based on the Maxwell architecture, combining speed with low power consumption.

The low power consumption and higher performance are made possible in part by more efficient scheduling and better memory compression. As a result, a GTX 980, which has 2048 Cuda cores, is faster than a GTX 780 Ti, which has 2816 cores, according to our benchmarks. In addition to more efficient cores, Nvidia has considerably increased the clock speed of the gpu compared to the 780Ti. The GTX 980 ticks at 1126MHz and has a boost clock to 1216MHz. The 4GB GDDR5 memory effectively taps at 7GHz and communicates with the GPU via a 256-bit wide bus. The tdp is only 165 watts, while that was 250 watts with the GTX 780 Ti.

The GTX 970 is a bit more economical than the GTX 980 and gets a TDP of 145 watts. Compared to the GTX 980, three SM units have been disabled, so that the card still has 1664 Cuda cores left. The clock speed and boost clock are also lower with 1050MHZ and 1178MHz than with its big brother. The memory size and speed are the same.

Both reference designs are equipped with a DVI connection, three Displayport 1.2 connections and HDMI 2.0. The latter option was especially sought after by owners of 4k televisions that are limited to a refresh rate of 30Hz by HDMI 1.4. Video card manufacturers are free to choose which connectors they mount on their own variant of the 970 or 980.

The suggested retail price of the GTX 980 is 550 euros, while the GTX 970 costs 325 euros. We have already extensively tested the GeForce GTX 980.