Nvidia GTX980 Maxwell Review

nVidia GTX980 Maxwell Review

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With the performance of the Kepler GPUs still capable of running every title we can think of, it’s no surprise that nVidia are aiming the GTX980 at those people who own a GTX680 rather than a current nVidia model. Certainly it seems to be a wise decision if you look at the enormous performance and efficiency benefits the GTX980 has over the 680. 

nVidia GTX980 Maxwell Review     nVidia GTX980 Maxwell Review  

nVidia GTX980 Maxwell Review     nVidia GTX980 Maxwell Review  

In our line of work we come across plenty of people who believe that bigger equals better. Clearly that’s a foolish stance to take as PC hardware history is littered with examples of products which didn’t have as much in raw hardware terms and yet performed better. The Maxwell core ably demonstrates this by giving double the performance per CUDA core when compared to the GK104 which found a home in such cards as the GTX760. As always though our job at OC3D is to show you what this all means in real terms, so if you fancy a lengthy discussion on the shader modules that form the GM204, and indeed spend hours of your life learning something that doesn’t make much difference to your end user experience, here is not the place to be.

nVidia GTX980 Maxwell Review     nVidia GTX980 Maxwell Review  

What we can appreciate is the vastly improved bandwidth overheads of the memory architecture, and how much faster DirectX 12 promised to be over the current DirectX 11. If you can calculate faster then there is more time to do other things, which leads to a faster frame rate. Naturally it’s something that we’ll probably feel the benefit of in the future when DX12 is upon us, but it’s nice to know what the future holds. 

nVidia GTX980 Maxwell Review     nVidia GTX980 Maxwell Review Â