NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB Video Card Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

GeForce GTX 980 Ti vs Radeon R9 290X

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti performed very well in our testing and we are quite impressed by the card and the performance level that you get from this $649 card. The GeForce GTX 980 Ti was running over 1200MHz in stock trim and tore up the game benchmarks and was usually just couple frames per second slower than the GeForce GTX Titan X and that is amazing considering the price difference. NVIDIA won’t be selling many GeForce GTX Titan X video cards now as the only people gunning for those will be those gamers that simply want the best and are not bound by any budget concerns. The AMD Radeon R9 290X video card (currently $329.99 shipped) is finally was introduced in 2013 and the performance is really starting to look that way as well. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti is in an entirely different class than the AMD Radeon R9 290X!

dx12 advanced features

NVIDIA has also come out and said that the GeForce GTX 980 Ti will be support DirectX 12 Feature Level 12.1 with support for more advanced features like a conservative raster and raster ordered views. AMD issues Legit Reviews a statement on DirectX 12 support on their current cards and then asked us moments later not to publish that information. Why AMD is being secretive about DirectX 12 support on Hawaii is certainly odd, but NVIDIA has been very forthcoming about the DX12 support they will offer.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB is priced at $649 and will include a bundled copy of Batman: Arkham Knight. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 is moving down to the $499 price point, which is a nice $50 price drop. No other changes were made to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX line-up, so it now looks like this:

  • GeForce GTX TITAN X: $999
  • GeForce GTX 980 Ti: $649
  • GeForce GTX 980: $499
  • GeForce GTX 970: $329
  • GeForce GTX 960: $199

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti cards are out now and are available from all of the NVIDIA partners this very second. There are the usual reference cards (shown below) and then the whole gamut of cards that feature custom cooling and factory overclocks that you can pick from!

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Video Card

We recommended the GeForce GTX Titan X as it was an amazing card that took single-GPU card performance levels to new heights. We didn’t know that the GeForce GTX 980 Ti would be performing so close to the Titan X at a fraction of the price. We easily recommend the GeForce GTX 980 Ti due to the price point and performance that it offers.

LR Recommended Award

As we mentioned in the introduction, AMD is releasing the Radeon Fury X next week according to rumors and we wouldn’t blame you if you waited until that came out to make your purchasing decision. Spending $650 on a video card is a sizable amount of cash and we are just days away from seeing how Maxwell will be able to handle Fiji!

Legit Bottom Line: The NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan 980 Ti is a beast that destroys the AMD Radeon R9 290X, but how it will perform compared to the AMD Radeon Fury is still unknown.