Nvidia GTX 980 & GTX 970 announced

[Handruin]

Looks like Nvidia has been able to bring down the wattage a bit and still increase the performance of their chips. From the various reviews and online summaries it seems the GTX 970 is the better price/performance leader between the two offerings. It even slightly edges out the R9 290X in some benchmarks. Competition is nice and it will be interesting to see what play AMD makes after this. Even reducing the price of the R9 290X still makes it considerably more power-hungry, hotter, and noisier than a GTX 970. Next question will be how well do the run Folding @ Home...


Anandtech review

ExtremeTech review

Techreport review

 

[sedrosken]

So, wait. Does that mean they're skipping the 800 series? ...Why, exactly?

 

[Handruin]

So, wait. Does that mean they're skipping the 800 series? ...Why, exactly?

Yes they skipped it to remove confusion because their mobile line is the 800 series. Having both in the same number would cause confusion.

 

[Stereodude]

Since when has potential confusion in the model numbers stopped Nvidia or AMD? :scratch:

 

[Handruin]

Well... They get some credit for not making it worse.

 

[snowhiker]

HardOCP review.

980 vs 780ti

1) $150 cheaper launch price than 780ti. ($549 vs $699)
2) Game play 10-20% faster than a 780ti.
3) Lower power/heat.
4) 3x displayports, 1x HDMI 2.0 and 1x DL-DVI-I
5) H.265 hardware encoding.

This is an upgrade targeted at the 680 owners. 780/Titan owners are probably fine with what they have now. With such a low power/heat card, Nvidia should be able to make an awesome dual-GPU card.

With all that said the 970 is definitely the "bang-for-the-buck" card by a long shot.

 

[Stereodude]

It seems AMD is getting left behind on the power front in GPUs now as well as CPUs. You can't compete on price forever and stay afloat

 

[CougTek]

Next question will be how well do the run Folding @ Home...

That is my question as well. I might lose my two DL380p any day now (it might be Monday like it might be in three months), but my contribution is doomed to fall drastically. I'll need something else to replace them. One or two GTX 970 probably won't equal the 20-core servers, but it should keep me among to the top team contributors while not costing too much in electricity.

 

[Mercutio]

It looks to me like playable 4k framerates are still a couple generations off for sub $300-hardware. Getting there at all with a card that runs at 165W is definitely an accomplishment. My ears perk up at the idea of hardware HEVC encoding, but I still can't find free software for handling that at all; again, it'll probably be a couple more product cycles before that's common.

It's hard to get excited about video cards now.

 

[Handruin]

HardOCP review.

980 vs 780ti

1) $150 cheaper launch price than 780ti. ($549 vs $699)
2) Game play 10-20% faster than a 780ti.
3) Lower power/heat.
4) 3x displayports, 1x HDMI 2.0 and 1x DL-DVI-I
5) H.265 hardware encoding.

This is an upgrade targeted at the 680 owners. 780/Titan owners are probably fine with what they have now. With such a low power/heat card, Nvidia should be able to make an awesome dual-GPU card.

With all that said the 970 is definitely the "bang-for-the-buck" card by a long shot.

What I like about the 970 and 980 being a upper mid market replacement is what will come after this...will it be a GTX 1070 and GTX 1080? Will those be larger die sizes or dual GPUs like you suggested?

It's nice to see a card released with HDMI 2.0 and the H.265 hardware HEVC.

 

[Handruin]

That is my question as well. I might lose my two DL380p any day now (it might be Monday like it might be in three months), but my contribution is doomed to fall drastically. I'll need something else to replace them. One or two GTX 970 probably won't equal the 20-core servers, but it should keep me among to the top team contributors while not costing too much in electricity.

I'm interested in going with a couple of the GTX 970s also. I'm still undecided on going X99 or Z97 for my new rig.

 

[Handruin]

It looks to me like playable 4k framerates are still a couple generations off for sub $300-hardware. Getting there at all with a card that runs at 165W is definitely an accomplishment. My ears perk up at the idea of hardware HEVC encoding, but I still can't find free software for handling that at all; again, it'll probably be a couple more product cycles before that's common.

It's hard to get excited about video cards now.

I'm not entirely sure how it works but would something like this free VideoLAN HEVC software encoder work with the hardware encoder on the GTX 900 series cards?

I see that nvidia has a Codec SDK but it appears to only be for the H.264. Maybe it'll be some time before we see the SDK for the HEVC/H.265? Their shadow play feature is supporting 4K recording as of right now, so they must have something even if it's not yet released to the public.

 

[Mercutio]

As far as I know, the VLC encoder is source-only at the moment. Which isn't terrible, but of course I'm looking for something a little more production ready. ffMPEG also has limited HEVC support, though I understand it's a little picky about what it will actually decode.

I know most of you guys are looking at this for GPU folding, but from a gaming standpoint is there a justification in getting a brand new card if you don't have access to a 4k panel?

 

[Handruin]

As far as I know, the VLC encoder is source-only at the moment. Which isn't terrible, but of course I'm looking for something a little more production ready. ffMPEG also has limited HEVC support, though I understand it's a little picky about what it will actually decode.

I know most of you guys are looking at this for GPU folding, but from a gaming standpoint is there a justification in getting a brand new card if you don't have access to a 4k panel?

No, not in my current setup for gaming. I'm using a 1080P panel which most games run great with my current setup on the highest settings. I believe I'm CPU constrained at this point. Others that have my GPU have higher benchmark and framerate results which is likely due to a much newer CPUs. Heat and power consumption would be the only justification without going to a higher resolution panel, but that's not a great justification.

 

[Stereodude]

I'm not entirely sure how it works but would something like this free VideoLAN HEVC software encoder work with the hardware encoder on the GTX 900 series cards?

I see that nvidia has a Codec SDK but it appears to only be for the H.264. Maybe it'll be some time before we see the SDK for the HEVC/H.265? Their shadow play feature is supporting 4K recording as of right now, so they must have something even if it's not yet released to the public.

The Anandtech review mentioned that there's currently no way to use the HEVC encoder. The drivers don't expose it.

 

[Handruin]

I missed that part in the article. Maybe it wasn't ready for release yet. I did more digging on the Shadow Play 4K recording and it looks like it still uses the H.264 encoding to do this. I was assuming it used the H.265 which was wrong.

 

[snowhiker]

What I like about the 970 and 980 being a upper mid market replacement is what will come after this...will it be a GTX 1070 and GTX 1080? Will those be larger die sizes or dual GPUs like you suggested?

You are probably right, looks like 970/980 are upper range SKUs, but not the "high-end" SKUs to come in the future. I'm guessing bigger die (aka 980ti) and dual GPU (aka 990)

780=2304 CUDA cores. (192 cores/unit)
780ti=2880 CUDA cores.

980=2048 CUDA cores. (128 cores/unit)
980ti= perhaps 2560 CUDA cores???

990 dual 980s.
995 dual 980tis. <<--- If Nvidia really want to milk the high-end.