Anyone who wants to play games in 4K at a decent framerate would require to drop at least $800 or probably more on a video card or else there’s a snowball’s chance in hell their gaming rig would have enough grunt to run that game. NVIDIA’s new $650 GTX 980 Ti is set to change that as this latest offering is said to pack even more power than last year’s formidable GTX 980.
This new beast of a card sports 2,816 parallel processing CUDA cores and 176 texture units, which is approximately 38 percent more than what the GTX 980 has, as well as 2 additional gigabytes of RAM bringing the total up to 6GBs of RAM. It is also based on Nvidia’s GM200 GPU which sits in the heart of the company’s incredibly expensive $1,000 Titan X card. Basically, that means in the instances where its former heavyweight card slows down in 4K — for example playing Battlefield 4 or The Witcher 3 — the 980 Ti should shine. Nvidia specifically stated that the new card very comfortably manages to run the mighty Grand Theft Auto V on 60 FPS while the 980 tends to clock in at around 35-45 FPS. For those waiting on a good deal for the 980, fret not as NVIDIA is also going to drop that card’s price from $550 to $500.
NVIDIA has also claimed that the GTX 980 Ti’s memory bandwidth is 50% faster than that of its predecessor, which makes all the difference when throwing large textures around. Of course, the Titan X is an even faster option but its absurdly high price puts it out of reach for everyone bar the most elite gamers.
With the $200 GTX 960 and $330 GTX 970, NVIDIA now has powerful cards for gamers with a wide variety of budgets. It is a bit of a shame though that we did not get a price dop for the GTX 970, which offers the best overall value for high quality 1080p gaming.