900 series video cards

[Karu62]

I saw the 900's have been released. after seeing the price of a 970 being the same as a 770 I went to the Nvidia website to compare the specs.

GTX 970 Engine Specs:

1664 CUDA Cores
1050 Base Clock (MHz)
1178 Boost Clock (MHz)
Texture Fill Rate 109 (GigaTexels/sec)

GTX 970 Memory Specs:

7.0 Gbps Memory Clock
4 GB Standard Memory Config
GDDR5 Memory Interface
256-bit Memory Interface Width
Memory Bandwidth 224 (GB/sec)

GTX 770 GPU Engine Specs:

1536 CUDA Cores
1046 Base Clock (MHz)
1085 Boost Clock (MHz)
Texture Fill Rate 134 (billion/sec)

GTX 770 Memory Specs:
7.0 GbpsMemory Speed
2048 MBStandard Memory Config
GDDR5 Memory Interface
256-bitMemory Interface Width
Memory Bandwidth 224.3 (GB/sec)

for me the two big numbers are the fill rate and memory bandwidth.

I look at the fill rate of the 970 and it says 109 Giga Texels. I have never heard of a texel so I cannot get an idea of the difference between 134 billion pixels per second and 109 Giga Texels per second.

any of you know how Texels work?

[Beardroid91]

The thing about the GTX 900 series is that the GTX 970 and 980 used half the power than the GTX 680 did. So alot of overclocking headroom.

GTX 780 uses about 250 W and the GTX 980 use around 170 W and does a better job, Maxwell is an epic GPU core

I'm seriously thinking of jumping ship, from Radeon to Nvidia in about a years time, by then i will settle for an overclocked version of the GTX 970

But for now i'm waiting and seeing how good these cards will be, and then in about a years time i can make an informed purchase
___

But lol i would seriously be very depressed if i just got a GTX 780 / Ti with these new cards costing the same and performing better

[MadManCK]

Lol, i'm very happy with my new GTX780Ti. It was a gift from a friend and it rocks.

I knew they would release those cards this month. They were supposed to be called 880. But 980...i guess the marketing division is on steroids at NVidia.

The 980 is a beefed up "680" chip (770 was an improved version of the same card). It is amazing how they have improved those chips in a couple of years. Starting with the 460 i think.

It is not really the high end chip from NVidia. That one has still to come. The successor of the Tesla Cards and the consumer cards later.
The 780Ti will still outperform the 980 in a lot of benchmarks. But it is nice to see the power consuming went down that much.

It is a weird policy. The GTX580 was followed by the 680, but the real successor was the Titanium and later the 780. So it is probably the same tactics all over again.

And that makes you wonder wat happens if the GTX780Ti gets the same treatment.

[Prepsi]

Lol, i'm very happy with my new GTX780Ti. It was a gift from a friend and it rocks.

I knew they would release those cards this month. They were supposed to be called 880. But 980...i guess the marketing division is on steroids at NVidia.

The 980 is a beefed up "680" chip (770 was an improved version of the same card). It is amazing how they have improved those chips in a couple of years. Starting with the 460 i think.

It is not really the high end chip from NVidia. That one has still to come. The successor of the Tesla Cards and the consumer cards later.
The 780Ti will still outperform the 980 in a lot of benchmarks. But it is nice to see the power consuming went down that much.

It is a weird policy. The GTX580 was followed by the 680, but the real successor was the Titanium and later the 780. So it is probably the same tactics all over again.

And that makes you wonder wat happens if the GTX780Ti gets the same treatment.

it's actually not, it's a new arc, so new chip.

[Beardroid91]

Prepsy's right about it being a new chip, Mad didn't you watch Game 24 / read about it, the way Nvidia could cut the powerusage in half was to make a new chip, sure it borrows the old design, but the old chip is pretty damn good to start with

At Game 24 they also showed their new video compression technology - the graphic card sends 4K pixels and compresses them into a 1920x1080 screen so that the pixels good smoother, very cool stuff
__

And Mad don't forget that the GTX 980 is only the first of the 980's cards and the massive OC potential it has



But either way, this a graphic battle way over my budget, cause these cards are crazy expensive

[MadManCK]

Lol, it is based on the same chip family design. Just an improved and new version of it. It is not a lame "rebadge" like the 680-770 (with better mem), that is true. It is a Maxwell chip. Shows also what potential is left in that design. Maybe beefed up was a bit disrespectful. But that is how i see it. It is probably a bit more than that
It is quite an achievement to see they get the same performance out of it as 2xGTX680 in SLI. On a single GTX980.

But the real high end Kepler chip has still to come.
You can only imagine what performance boost that one will get.

Some new tech is indeed interesting. 4K gaming is the next step for PC gaming. With 2 of these GTX980 cards in SLI, you should get enough horsepower for that.

But if you want to play on triple screen 4K, you still will run into issues when you want a steady 60fps. Luxury probs, i suppose.

As the Maxwell is the new high-midrange card, i suspect it to be cheaper than the GTX780Ti. But NVidia has a way of milking the machine...
Most shops start above GTX780 level and just under the GTX780Ti. As these are introduction prices and the chips are cheaper to produce than Kepler chips, i expect the price to drop to under 500€ in the next couple of months. But we will see. Question of demand. The introduction price is a lot steeper than anticipated. The GTX970 is more in tune.



@Karu; grab the new 970GTX. Price difference is very small. No brainer really. Twice the mem and higher perf.

[BBvideo 640,360][/BBvideo]

PS That was the first Video Card Crash Test i have seen
This must be the most cheesy product narrative of all time. But it is good to see the confidence from NVidia

[Karu62]

I was planning on getting the 970, just because of the 4gb of memory. the thing I was wondering about is the GigaTexel thing.

[MadManCK]

Some article from Anandtech

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8549/shor ... 1000-words" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I was planning on getting the 970, just because of the 4gb of memory. the thing I was wondering about is the GigaTexel thing.

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition ... re-element" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

A texel is similar to a pixel (picture element) because it represents an elementary unit in a graphic. But there are differences between the texels in a texture map and the pixels in an image display. In special instances, there might be a one-to-one correspondence between texels and pixels in some parts of the rendition of a 3-D object. But for most, if not all, of a 3-D rendition, the texels and pixels cannot be paired off in such a simple way.

[Karu62]

lol, I didn't understand a single word of that. I guess texels make for a better image at varying distances is about the most I could get out of that.

[MadManCK]

lol, I didn't understand a single word of that. I guess texels make for a better image at varying distances is about the most I could get out of that.

OK, let me try it than. A digital picture is build with pixels. A texture is made of texels.
A texture is a file that is wrapped around digital wire frames, made from triangles, called polygons. That is basically how a game is built. A texture can have a lot of different filters applied to it, like lighting or reflection.

You can convert a picture from tarmac, for example, to textures for a road. Most game roads are made of different layers of textures.

So for performance in games, the texel fill rate is more relevant.