Nvidia GeForce GTX 980: a faster graphics card that surprises at its price

• 19 September 2014
• by: Bruno Bandeira
• in: General,Internet,Technology
• Tags: de video, placa
• note: no comments

In the past year, PC graphics cards have reached gigantic proportions, and the price has gone up with it: the Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan costs an incredible US$ 1,000 (R$ 4,000 in Brazil), not to mention the Titan Z from US$ 3000 (which costs over R$ 11,000 around here).

Today, Nvidia tries something different: the new GeForce GTX 980 it's the fastest graphics card Nvidia has ever made, it's incredibly efficient, and it starts at US$ 549 (R$ 2,249 in Brazil).

The GTX 980 only has 5.2 billion transistors, compared to the 7.1 billion you'd find on a GTX 780 Ti or GTX Titan. Its 2,048 CUDA cores and its 256-bit memory interface don't seem to be a match for the 2,880 cores and 384-bit bus you find on the Ti 780.

But the new graphics card, based on the Maxwell architecture, has a virtually unprecedented clock rate of 1,126 MHz (instead of 875 MHz), 4GB of GDDR5 memory (instead of 3GB), and everything runs on TDP (maximum amount of power). to dissipate) of just 165 watts. In comparison, the GTX 780 and Titan cards consume much more power, with their 250W TDP.

And according to the AnandTech, PC Perspective, Hot Hardware and other sites, this video card is insanely fast. Nvidia recommends two of them in SLI to play at 4K resolution with maximum graphics, but some games run at 4K using only one card.

The GTX 980 is faster than the competition, including the AMD Radeon R9 290x and the GTX 780 Ti itself. The difference isn't huge, but remember: it does it more efficiently.

Perhaps most interesting is what you (and game developers) will be able to do with this Maxwell card, thanks to some new techniques from Nvidia. With DSR (Very High Dynamic Resolution), games look much sharper on your Full-HD monitor because the graphics card renders them in 4K resolution and perfectly downsizes to your screen. The difference is in the details:

With MFAA (Multi-Frame Sampling Anti-aliasing), images are less aliased using less power: Nvidia promises 8x MSAA quality at the cost of 4x MSAA. And with VXGI (Global Voxel Illumination), developers will be able to create much better looking games with more realistic dynamic lighting that actually changes with the player's actions. This will be integrated into Unreal Engine 4, and the first games with this feature are expected to debut in early 2015.

And last but not least, Nvidia is making a number of improvements specifically for VR headsets like the Oculus Rift. This includes reducing the latency between your head movements and the action you see on your screen so you don't get dizzy.

Nvidia will also support VR headsets with two graphics cards working together via SLI – each card renders images for each eye. The company says that, in this way, it is possible to play even games that were not designed for virtual reality.

The card also has three DisplayPort outputs for running up to three G-Sync displays simultaneously, and supports HDMI 2.0 for 4K displays running at 60Hz with 4:4:4 color accuracy.

The sign GeForce GTX 970, in turn, is a more affordable option that offers the features mentioned above. You can get the same benefits as the Maxwell architecture, but with a 10% to 20% reduction in performance. It costs US$ 329 (R$ 1,599 in Brazil).

The new GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 are now available in Brazil, through the main video card manufacturers. They should fully replace the GTX 780 Ti, GTX 780 and GTX 770; the GTX 760, in turn, will continue to be on sale.