NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti With GM200 GPU Possibly Arriving in Q2 2015 – Custom Variants Get Greenlight

Last week, an interesting rumor popped out of nowhere that NVIDIA might be preparing the GeForce GTX 980 Ti graphics card. The graphics card is said to feature the same GM200 GPU core which is fused on NVIDIA’s GTX Titan X and the Quadro M6000. Both cards are as high-end as it gets for both workstation and gaming markets however the come at a really high price. The GeForce GTX 980 Ti, that launches in Q2 2015 is going to feature a more better price range compared to Titan X by skimming down on a few things.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti – GM200 Aimed Solely at Gamers

NVIDIA’s Titan brand is usually aimed for users who want better compute performance and that has been true since the Kepler generation of cards. The Kepler GK110 based Titan and Titan Black both held a $999 US price tag and featured great FP64 performance at a lower price point compared to Quadro solutions who are purely aimed at workstation users. With GM200, it was expected that NVIDIA will loose that advantage since it was being rumored prior to launch that NVIDIA will not have sufficient FP64 hardware blocks on GM200 that are necessary to deliver better compute than previous Titan cards. The launch of the Titan X confirmed this, with the card featuring just 0.2 TFLOPS of double precision performance. The single precision performance is rated at 7 TFLOPs and is the same for both GM200 based cards. The only difference this made between the GK110 and GM200 based versions of the Titan cards was that a single benefit of having that extra compute power for professionals was lost.

Yet, the Titan X is still price at $999 US. The reason is pretty simple I must say and you have to look at factors aside the compute performance to see why it costs so much. Titan X is the single most fastest card available. That is one reason and I am referring to it as a single chip based card. Second, it has 12 GB of VRAM which is fully utilizable. And lastly, there’s no single chip card currently in sights that could outperform it considering the competition has their cards launching in late Q2 or even second half of the year (rumors). There’s one card that does directly compete with Titan X in terms of pricing and that’s AMD’s Radeon R9 295X2. 295X2 is a behemoth with amazing thermal cooling solution and two speedy Hawaii chips powering underneath its hood. The card retails at $699.99 US which is a sweet deal and even though a Titan X manages to remain head on head with it in most benchmarks, the dual Hawaii chips have a lot of muscle to keep up with the fearsome GM200 GPU.

However, that might change in some time. We have already seen the Titan X *a single GPU based card* beating 295X2 *a dual GPU based card* in several benchmarks at 2K and 4K resolutions. Sometimes, its not the VRAM that is required to power but pure GPU strength to power games. NVIDIA’s upcoming GeForce GTX 980 Ti may be a solution which does that. People have bought Titan X but there are several people still who have been waiting for a cheaper GM200 solution. Their calls may have been heard and the card that was expected to arrive later in summer might be coming just a bit early in May-June timeframe which is right when Computex hits the road.

Our fellow tipster “CloudFire” tipped us his findings which he has summed up over at Anandtech which points to an early launch during May 16-26th. The findings confirm what we know so far but also talk about some Metal Enhanced version which will launch later. We cannot confirm this much however we have sources telling that the card is actually going to be on showcase at Computex 2015 and NVIDIA is giving full go-ahead to custom variants which will include the HOF V2 variant from GALAX that is expected to break some huge records. The one thing also pointed out is that the card will feature 6 GB of VRAM but have higher frequencies which will result in better overall GPU performance compared to Titan X and the card will actually be able to turn out faster than the Titan X itself.

It can be expected that the card will be faster than the Titan X since the GeForce GTX 780 Ti was faster than the original Titan even though it had only 3 GB VRAM available compared to 6 GB on GTX Titan. The GTX 980 Ti will be a similar case featuring 6 GB VRAM compared to 12 GB on the Titan X but being faster due to higher clocks and custom variants. You can check out the rumored specifications in the table below:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Alleged Specifications:

	NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X	Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960
GPU Architecture	Maxwell	Maxwell	Maxwell	Maxwell	Maxwell
GPU Name	GM200	GM200	GM204	GM204	GM206
Die Size	601mm2	601mm2	398mm2	398mm2	228mm2
Process	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm
CUDA Cores	3072	3072	2048	1664	1024
Texture Units	192	192	128	104	64
Raster Devices	96	96	64	64	32
Clock Speed	1002 MHz	1100 MHz+?	1126 MHz	1051 MHz	1126 MHz
Boost Clock	1089 MHz	1200 MHz+?	1216 MHz	1178 MHz	1178 MHz
VRAM	12 GB GDDR5	6 GB GDDR5	4 GB GDDR5	4 GB GDDR5	2 GB GDDR5
Memory Bus	384-bit	384-bit	256-bit	256-bit	128-bit
Memory Clock	7.0 GHz	7.0 GHz?	7.0 GHz	7.0 GHz	7.0 GHz
Memory Bandwidth	336.0 GB/s	336.0 GB/s	224.0 GB/s	224.0 GB/s	112.0 GB/s
TDP	250W	250W	165W	145W	120W
Power Connectors	8+6 Pin	8+6 Pin	Two 6-Pin	Two 6-Pin	One 6-Pin
Price	$999 US	$699 ?	$549 US	$329 US	$199 US