The GTX 980 Ti is here, bringing insane levels of performance at a more reasonable price point than the Rs 90,000 GTX Titan X. Nvidia sent us a reference 980 Ti just a day after the 2nd June launch. We got hands-on with the new card and put it through its paces in IGNdia’s nine-game benchmark suite. No surprises here. At 1080p, the 980 Ti eats eighth-gen games for breakfast. We’re talking a more-or-less perfectly locked 60 FPS experience at Ultra settings.

Nvidia claims that the GTX 980 Ti offers up to 60 percent more performance than the outgoing 780 Ti. We put this to the test by benchmarking our trusty Asus 780 Ti DCU II OC against the reference 980 Ti. The results are truly eye-opening. Nvidia means business with the new card, and performance is simply off-the-charts. With AMD slated to launch the Radeon Fury X on 16th June at E3, things are looking to get very interesting. We’ll be doing a hands-on with the Fury X very soon, so make sure to stay updated at IGNdia. But right now, let’s get down to business and have a look at the 980 Ti.

Our reference 980 Ti came in a very unassuming green-trimmed black box, bearing the Nvidia logo and “The World’s Most Advanced GPU” along the green trim. Only the card was included, packed tightly in plush black Styrofoam. We really appreciated the minimalistic approach to packaging here. It puts emphasis on the card itself. The GTX 980 Ti is most definitely a looker, with a lovely aluminium shell. The reference card features a single 5000 RPM fan, which we found could get quite loud at higher speeds.

GTX 980 Ti Specs:

GPU-Z provides an overview of the key specs of the GTX 980 Ti. We’re not going to go in detail here as the cut-down GM200 architecture has already been analysed in depth over at Anandtech.

Thermals, Noise, and GPU Boost:

By default, the GTX 980 Ti’s GPU Boost behavior targets a temperature of 83 degrees Celsius and adjusts the boost clock and fan speed accordingly to stick closely to that target. We observed the temperature sticking fairly close to 83 degrees although it did occasionally spike to 84-85 degrees. This is quite high, though the card is designed to operate within this thermal envelope. We opted instead to use EVGA Precision X to tweak the fan speed curve. We used the “Aggressive” Preset. While this often got quite loud with the fans kicking into high gear, the 980 Ti stayed at a very comfortable 70-71 degrees, even when under load, and didn’t drop its boost clock at all. In terms of thermals and noise, the tradeoff is this—if you stick to the GPU’s stock behaviour, your temps will hover in the 83-85 degree range and the card will throttle a little when under load. On the other hand, if you can live with the noise, setting a custom fan speed curve will net you much lower temps and a more consistent core clock. Talking about core clocks, these vary under load and depending on the game, due to GPU Boost. For the most part, the GTX 980 Ti sticks to 1189 MHz on the core clock, although it can go as high as 1202 MHz—keeping the card running cool with a tweaked fan curve helped us hit those higher speeds more consistently.

Benchmarking Methodology:

We ran all benchmarks on both the 980 Ti and the Asus 780 Ti DCU II OC. We ran all games at 1080p which, per Steam, is the most commonly used resolution by PC gamers. Settings were turned up as high as they would go—we enabled additional Nvidia-specific settings also, where possible (Enhanced God-rays in Far Cry 4,for example.) When we get hold of the Radeon Fury X, we will use hardware-agnostic settings, but with just the 780 Ti and the 980 Ti, it makes sense to enable the Nvidia-specific settings, considering how punishing these can be on graphics cards.

Just a note: We strongly recommend against using Nvidia TXAA in any configuration. We’d enabled this when possible for a “fully maxed out” experience, but found to our dismay that TXAA—TXAA and nothing else—pushed the 980 Ti into the sub-50 FPS zone for extended periods of time. For a card which handles 4K gaming reasonably well, it’s simply unacceptable to get a sub-60 FPS update in any modern game at 1080p. The good news is that things get buttery smooth again as soon as you swap out TXAA for post-process anti-aliasing or MFAA (Multi-Frame Anti-Aliasing), the new trick up Maxwell’s sleeve that allows 900 series cards to deliver 4x MSAA image quality at a 2x MSAA performance cost. If you see any games running at below 60 in our benchmarks, don’t be disappointed—swap out TXAA for something lighter and you’ll get a wonderful 60 FPS in no time, even in Assassin’s Creed Unity.

In each game, except for Grand Theft Auto 5 and Dragon Age: Inquisition, which both provide intensive built-in benchmarks, we picked a specific area in the environment that seemed to best match conditions during typical gameplay. For instance, forThe Witcher 3, we did our run through the village of White Orchard.

We ran multiple benchmarking runs, per game, per card, each of which lasted for 30 seconds. We used FRAPS to record the average framerate.

Main platform:

Graphics cards Tested:

Benchmarking Results: The Witcher 3

The Witcher 3 clearly takes our expectations for the GTX 980 Ti…and runs with them. We’re looking at a nearly 100 percent increase in framerates compared to the 780 Ti, with the Maxwell card pegging 63 FPS on average, compared to the 780 Ti at 33 FPS. While the performance delta between the 780 Ti and the 980 Ti is very real, these numbers need to be taken with a pinch of salt: there were reports on social media thatThe Witcher 3 “game-ready” drivers hindered performance on Kepler cards like the 780 Ti, causing them to perform worse than they ought to. Nvidia stated that this was due to substantially better tessellation performance on the Maxwell architecture as opposed to Kepler. With Nvidia Hairworks disabled, we saw substantial performance gains on the 780 Ti, with the framerate hovering in the mid-40s. It should be noted that Hairworks makes extensive use of tessellation, with over 120,000 tessellated hairs rendered when viewing Geralt’s head close-up. Hairworks didn’t have such a significant impact on the 980 Ti. Here, with Hairworks disabled, we saw the framerate hovering in the low 70s. This is much more in line with the 60 percent performance gain Nvidia was talking about.

Bottom Line: With Hairworks enabled, the GTX 980 Ti is, incredibly, 91 percent faster than the 780 Ti. Turn off Hairworks and you’re looking at a more realistic 60-65 percent performance delta.