Final GeForce GTX 980 Specifications Revealed

The new flagship GPU from Nvidia; the GeForce GTX 980, has been rumoured for some time now. When Nvidia announced their Game24 event, it didn’t take much to put two and two together and figure out that it would be presented during that show. Actually, they will be presenting two new cards, but it will be the GTX 980 that steals the show while the GTX 970 is more of a gap filler.

Since then we’ve seen a steady stream of leaks, photos and specifications. We’ve seen both the stock-card itself and some of the after market coolers. Now thanks to videocardz.com we have the final specifications to share with you.

The new Nvidia flagship is a card that deservers to carry this title, at least when you look at the pure specifications. The card uses the new GM204 processor and it is the first GPU based upon the Second Generation Maxwell architecture. The new processor still uses the 28 nm fabrication node, something many people had hoped to be smaller.

It features 16 Streaming Multiprocessors and has 64 Raster Operating Units (ROP), that’s twice that of the Kepler GK110. With 5.2 billion transistors packed into the GM204 the GPU has a die size of 398 mm². The L2 cache has also grown quite a bit, it has actually quadrupled into 2 MB.

Some of the new features mentioned are Dynamic Super Resolution, which is basically a new up-scaling technology advertised as “4k Quality on a 1080p display”. It also has Third Generation Delta Colour Compression; a technology that will help increase memory efficiency on the limited 256-bit interface. The last new technology we get teased with is the Multi-Pixel Programmable Sampling; a technology that improves sample randomization and reduces quantization artefacts.

The above was the processor specific numbers and while relevant, they’re not the most important thing for us now, so lets summarize what the GTX 980 really packs. It has 2048 CUDA cores, 128 TMU’s and 64 ROP’s. The card is equipped with 4 GB GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit interface. The memory will run at 7012 MHz effectively (1750 MHz) while the GPU itself has a base clock of 1126 MHz and a boost of 1216 MHz. 

These are some really nice figures for a card that only draws 165W TDP. This is only two-thirds of the power consumption the GK110 has, with its 250W. We also get confirmation that the GTX 980 will support HDMI 2.0 among its five display outputs, making them a DVI, a HDMI 2.0 and three DisplayPort 1.2 connectors.

The retail price, while still only a rumour, seems to be set at a MSRP of $599; about the same price as the current GTX 780Ti.

Thank you Videocardzfor providing us with this information

Images courtesy of Videocardz