 In February 2013, Nvidia introduced the world to the concept of the $1000 MSRP graphics card with an obscene amount of video memory. 6 gigs. Then three months after that, they gave us a slightly cut down GPU with half as much RAM for a much lower price. Now, it looks like the cycle is repeating. Three months ago, Nvidia refreshed the Titan with the new Titan X, also $1000, very high performance and loaded with VRAM, 12 gigs this time around. And now, they're giving us the GTX 980 Ti, a slightly cut down Titan X with half as much VRAM at a much lower price. So does it impress or is it a mess? Let's find out. The Corsair HX1200i power supply delivers 80 plus platinum efficiency for quiet, efficient power and Corsair Link Digital for advanced monitoring and control. Click my face to learn more. So I would tell you about the looks of the GTX 980 Ti if I thought there would be any point to doing such a thing. It looks like every other enthusiast grade graphics card out of Nvidia in the last couple of years. I mean, come on, you guys. At least change something. I mean, RGB is cool these days. Razer even made an RGB mouse pad. How about RGB lighting on top of the card? Something. Ugh. Well, we'll do the tour pretty quickly then this time around. Next to the green and only green GeForce logo are two SLI fingers on the left for up to four way SLI support and a six pin and eight pin for power on the right. The card connects to your motherboard with a backwards compatible PCI Express 16x Gen 3 plug and to your display with any or all three of the DisplayPort 1.2 connectors enabling up to 4K surround G-Sync. If you're into that sort of thing or you can slum it with DVI-D or HDMI 2.0 if you're not. Specs wise, there are no major surprises if you watched our video on the GTX Titan X a little while back. It's pretty much that except minus some. It's based on the same GM200 core, features the same base and boost clock speeds at 1 GHz and 1075 MHz, the same 384-bit memory bus connected to the same 7 GHz GDDR5, and the same 250 Watt TDP as its bigger, blacker brother with only the reduction in SMs from 24 to 22, so about a 10% reduction in CUDA cores and texture units and memory from 12 gigs to a still very beefy 6 gigs to differentiate it. Which is really interesting to me. I mean, what purpose exactly then did the Titan X serve at $1000? To give gamers eager to have the big Kepler architecture core a less than 3 month head start on GM200 performance? Because after GTX 780 launched, you could make arguments for the Titan and the Titan Black that came later, along the lines of, well, they're also, you know, great compute cards with FP64 double precision performance that's leaps and bounds ahead of the gaming cards. Not the case this time, and with GTX 980 Ti coming in at $350 less than Titan X, the only reason to buy the king of the hill seems to be bragging rights, as we'll see when we look at the performance numbers. For now, let's talk tech though, because as usual, Nvidia is launching some new stuff alongside their sexy new GPU. Their new VR features sound really interesting, I mean, we've been stuck at 28nm chips plumbed up to GDDR5 for a long time, so it takes a very different sort of innovation to squeeze more and more performance out of what is, at a very base level, pretty darn similar technology, and that's where stuff like 3rd gen Delta color compression comes in to make the most of the available memory bandwidth, and seems to also have been the inspiration alongside the very demanding requirements like high frame rate, stereo 3D rendering, and high resolution for VR, for Nvidia's use of multi-res shading as a way for the GPU to render less of a frame in virtual reality to realize anywhere from a 1.3 to 2x performance gain by effectively not bothering with pixels that would have been cut off in the required fisheye conversion. We hope, anyway. We're still waiting for retail head-mounted displays to verify any of that. And G-Sync got some updates too, some of which are not even remotely related to this graphics card, like the fact that G-Sync for laptops is now official instead of some weird leaked driver from Asus, but more on topic, windowed mode works now, so full screen windowed mode gamers will be able to take advantage of the undeniably better experience that is variable refresh rate gaming. DirectX 12 feature level 12.1 is another interesting one, it's not really new per se, since other Maxwell cards and even AMD's Tonga GPUs will support it, but we have more details about DirectX 12, so lots of DirectX 10 or 11 cards can take advantage of the lower CPU overhead and more bare metal programming techniques to squeeze extra performance from the GPU. We already knew this, but now we know that only card supporting level 12.1 will get some newer, prettier rendering features. Alright, so with that out of the way, Luke's on a plane to Taiwan, so I'm gonna talk performance today. This baby was hooked up to our usual X99 platform with 16 gigs of DDR4 memory, a Core i7-5930K, an Asus X99 Deluxe, and all of that, and we ran using the latest beta drivers from both AMD and Nvidia, with a focus on recent and or demanding games at 4K resolution. No cards were overclocked. And there was really only one surprise here. The DTX980Ti performed just about the same, like within our margin of error, as the Titan X, across the board. I had to rerun the numbers a couple of times just to be sure, but after some tinkering, I figured out what was going on, I think. Our 980Ti, whether it's thanks to some extra power budget from the fewer functional units or just a lucky sample, naturally boosts up its clock speed higher than our Titan X in the same operating environment on the same driver in the same games. As far as overclocking goes, I'm not sure where the two will land relative to each other. Maybe let me know in the comments if you want to see an overclocked 980Ti follow up to this video. But at stock speed, don't be fooled by the similarity in price and product name between the DTX980 and the 980Ti. If you're an enthusiast who wants outstanding gaming performance without feeling like kind of a dumbass, you're buying, at least if you're shopping on the Nvidia side, a DTX970 or a 980Ti, with the Titan X and the 980 left pretty much out in the cold. Speaking of cold, you know what's not cold? Having a mobile phone service that, when you call them, they actually talk to you. When you call up Ting, you will speak to a person who will help you with whatever it is you need. How much does that cost, you might ask? Well, it's included for every Ting customer. It's not actually a special thing, and Ting customers only pay for exactly what they're going to use. So you're going to want to try out their calculator, enter what you're paying for your bill now, enter your actual usage, and see if you could save money on Ting. It's linus.ting.com, and the average Ting bill is only about $24 per month per device, and there's some extra bonuses as well. If you're stuck on contract, they'll cover up to 25% of your cancellation fee, up to $75, and if you use our link, you'll get $25 in service credit or towards a new device. So check it out now at the link in the video description. All right, so that's pretty much it, guys. Thanks for watching. Like if you liked, dislike if you disliked. Leave a comment, preferably at the link to our forum in the video description. If you want to discuss this video, also linked in the video description, you can buy a cool t-shirt just like this one. You can make us a monthly contribution if you think what we're doing is awesome and you want us to do more of it, or you can change your bookmark for Amazon to one with our affiliate code. So every time you buy 980 TIs, we get a small kickback if you click through that link. That kind of thing helps us out a whole ton. Thanks again for watching, and as always, don't forget to subscribe or follow your laundry. Did you forget your laundry? I'm watching you.