NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Video Card Images Leaked
Earlier today we posted up images what appears to be the upcoming Radeon R9 390X video card with High Bandwidth Memory and now we get to talk about the card that is likely going be the card to challenge it on the marketplace for the time being. The card we are talking about would be the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti. This card is rumored to be a feature reduced version of the GeForce GTX Titan X with unknown clock speeds. That means all the GeForce GTX 980 owners will be a little upset, but all those with GeForce GTX 480, 580, 680 or 780 video cards could be eyeballing this card as the next card from NVIDIA to own.
From the images leaked today on VC it looks like NVIDIA is sticking with the same GPU cooler design that the have been using for a couple generations now. From what we can see from the images the GTX 980 Ti has three DisplayPort video outputs along with HDMI and DVI outputs. This is the same configuration as the GeForce GTX Titan X, so it looks like not much has changed with regards to the PCB, GPU, CPU cooler, video outputs and so on. M
ost of the differences will likely be in the GPU where the number of CUDA cores has been altered along with clock speeds and the amount of memory on the card. VD says that the GeForce GTX 980 Ti will have 6GB of GDDR5 memory on-board, which is half the amount of memory that comes on the GeForce GTX Titan X. The site also claims that it will feature the GM200-310 Maxwell GPU, but haven’t guessed or been told what the clock speeds are just yet.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti doesn’t appear that it will come with a back plate to help protect the card and make it more visually appealing when installed in a tower. NVIDIA didn’t have one on the GeForce GTX 980 since it reduced the airflow for 3-way SLI setups. We can understand the company being concerened about airflow, but how many people are actually running 3-way SLI setups with their flagship cards? Most are likely buying one or two of these cards at best, so we think a back plate should be included and then removed if needed.
The image above also shows that the card is using one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCIe power connectors.
Online rumors show the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti will be launching this month ahead of the AMD Radeon R9 300 series flagship card that is expected to launch in June around the E3 Expo time frame. NVIDIA and Jen-Hsun put a great deal of planning when to release cards, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out. AMD’s High Bandwidth Memory design for Fiji looks pretty good, but is all that bandwidth needed for game titles today or even a year down the road? HBM looks like it will be stupid fast and it looks like it will help with VR gaming down the road, but is it needed for 4K gaming today? NVIDIA in recent years have been preaching that they have the complete package and that it takes more than a good GPU design to have a good user experience. We saw a news post the other day that AMD hasn’t released a WHQL Catalyst video card driver since September 2014! Ouch!