NVIDIA picked a curious date for the release of their GeForce GTX 980 Ti, earlier than AMD who is expected to release their Fiji cards later this month. This suggests that NVIDIA is confident in their product, which seems to ring true after completing this review. Based on the same GM200 silicon as the recently released GeForce GTX Titan X, the GTX 980 Ti can definitely impress with its performance. Despite a lower shader count (2812 vs 3072), but while running the same clocks, the GTX 980 Ti almost performs as well as the Titan X. Depending on the resolution, the gap is between 2% (1600x900) and 4% (4K), which I would say is pretty much the same unless you look at benchmarks and really playing games instead. Compared to the GTX 980, the difference is a sizable 22% at 4K and 20% at 2560x1440—higher resolutions are, again, resulting in a higher performance difference. The GTX 970 is 26% behind at 1920x1080 and AMD's fastest single-GPU card, the R9 290X, is almost 30% slower. AMD's R9 295 X2 dual-GPU ends up being faster than a single GTX 980 Ti, and while priced similarly, suffers from all sorts of CrossFire issues in recent games.

Just like with the Titan X, single GPU gaming at 4K is finally made possible with the GTX 980 Ti. The card has enough horse power to drive all games at more than 30 FPS at 4K resolution. Pair that with a G-Sync 4K monitor and you'll have a stutter-free experience that looks awesome. Why is that so great? Because many games today do not support multi-GPU setups well; forums are full of people that report no scaling, negative scaling, rendering errors, etc. With the GTX 980 Ti, there will be no such drama, so just enjoy the game.

The GTX 980 Ti's Power consumption matches that of the Titan X almost exactly, with the differences being 1W in non-gaming states and no more than 12W in gaming or Furmark. Overall, this makes the GTX 980 Ti the second-most efficient card we have ever tested, slightly better than the GTX Titan X, but slightly worse than the GTX 980.

Again, just like with the Titan X, I'm not impressed by the cooler. It's missing the wonderful fan-off-in-idle feature that was introduced with the GTX 960/970/980 and is also quite noisy in full-load gaming, even slightly noisier than the Titan X or R9 295 X2. This is something that custom board designs by companies like MSI and ASUS will solve in the near-future; first products by board partners are expected later this week at Computex.

Oh, and there is no backplate. Why? NVIDIA says that people who used a GTX 980 SLI setup didn't figure they had to remove the little blackplate to maximize SLI airflow, so we are back to no backplate yet again. NVIDIA's choice of 6 GB for the GTX 980 Ti makes perfect sense and is the right choice; 12 GB for the Titan X was too much, lead to no real benefit, and increased cost.

NVIDIA set an MSRP of $650 for the GTX 980 Ti, which is reasonable and falls in line with the company's previous pricing strategy. There are other options at that price level, too. First, there is the GTX 970 SLI at $640 or so. It should offer around 8% more performance, but requires two PCIe slots and depends on multi-GPU driver support for optimum scaling, so I think I'll take the GTX 980 Ti over that. Next is AMD's R9 295 X2, which has had its price reduced to $620. This card is much faster than the GTX 980 Ti when there is a working CrossFire profile, something AMD hasn't been pushing recently. It, as such, definitely isn't a solid choice if you want to play games on release-day. That said, if I were a hardcore Battlefield gamer with little to no interest in other titles, the R9 295 X2 could be a good choice. And then there is the big unknown variable in AMD's upcoming Fiji cards, which could change things dramatically, so definitely wait on making a purchase until those cards are released.