NVIDIA has officially released the rumored GeForce GTX 980 and GeForce GTX 970 video cards during the Game24 event held at several locations around the world thus launching the GeForce GTX 9xx family of graphics solutions. The new family is expected to offer the full power of the latest Maxwell architecture as well as revolutionary power efficiency.
The GeForce GTX 980 and GeForce GTX 970 are both based on the company’s new 28 nm GM204 GPU but as the brand names suggest the GTX 980 is the more powerful of the two. It comes with 2048 CUDA cores, 128 TMUs, 64 ROPs and a 256-bit memory bus that serves 4 GB of on-board GDDR5 memory. The GTX 980 runs at GPU clock speeds of 1126 MHz and 1216 MHz in GPU Boost mode, while the memory operates at 7000 MHz.
The GeForce GTX 970 hosts 1664 CUDA cores, 104 TMUs, 64 ROPs and the same 256-bit memory bus/4 GB GDDR5 memory combination but the card has been cut down in the clock speed department. It runs at 1050 MHz for the GPU (1178 MHz GPU Boost) but the memory operates at the same 7000 MHz. Thus both cards offer 224 GB/sec of memory bandwidth.
The GeForce GTX 980 sells now for USD 549, while the GTX 970 can be yours today for USD 329. Both models are available from major video card manufacturers.
In addition to the new product launch, NVIDIA has announced that it will discontinue the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, GTX 780 and GTX 770. The reason for this decision is simple – the GTX 980 is much faster than the GTX 780 Ti and the GTX 780, while it is also simpler to make featuring full 2 billion transistors less than the GTX 780 Ti, four fewer memory chips and a lighter VRM. The GTX 970 targets several sub-USD 350 products, which takes the GTX 770 into irrelevance. The GTX 760 has also gotten a price cut and the card now costs USD 219. The replacement of the GTX 760 – the GeForce GTX 960 will arrive sometime in October 2014.
Source: NVIDIA