If 18% faster than the former flagship at 165W and 4GB ram is what you want then yes. If you have a reasonable GPU right now though, I’d recommend waiting for the inevitable node shrink and AMD’s answer. GCN is getting a little long in the tooth and surely they have something in the pipeline.
The 980 strikes me as a deliberately incremental product. The architecture is clearly nowhere near its thermal limits and actually has 30% fewer transistors than the titan. The ~20% performance upgrade is just enough to be tempting to current 5xx and 6xx owners. This just tells me nVidia is deliberately making the smallest possible upgrade that people will buy and leaving a lot of headroom for a 10xx and 11xx series (well, they’ll probably change the naming scheme again after 9xx) based on the same architecture.
If someone were to build Windows 64 versions with the required sm_52 kernel, it would be pretty easy to gather more Blender specific benchmark results from early adopters.
I’m not suggesting anyone should actually buy AMD products at this point since OpenCL doesn’t work. However, AMD can compete with nVidia just fine in the gaming market. So whenever they launch their new flagship, you can be sure nVidia is going to do two things immediately: deliver a faster flagship, and lower the prices on the 980. They’ve clearly set themselves up to do just that by delivering a performance-wise underwhelming 980 with a lot of room to grow.
Gaming suitability used to factor into my graphics card purchasing decisions, but nowadays, it’s all about cycles. Though I’m sure that after ~5 years out of the gaming scene, any modern graphics card on any semi-modern game would blow my socks off.
Nvidia is definitely holding back, though. After all, 600 bucks isn’t that much money as far as nvidia is concerned. They need to save some tricks for the 990 and titan, after all.
600 bucks is pretty much standard for the 80 cards (more like 550 actually).
Honestly i think that as soon as AMD launches they are going to bring a 980ti or a new Titan.
Price wise the 970 is much more appealing though i wonder what the cycles benchmarks might show
Do we have alien technology to perform time travel.
And bring photos from the future to the past. It was possible in back to the future too.
Hm maybe if i connect my Blender output into the negative mass matrix of my Delorean tube warp Lattice.
And then i will combine that wire with …t…t…poof
These cards are really good, but, owning 680 gtx 4gb, i’ll wait till some decent 8gb cards will be more affordable. From few month to year i think, not more.
And, i don’t know about you guys, but didn’t much liked that moon landing presentation. It really lacked some details, especially on the moon surface. It just looked like from some 10 y.o game. Landing module, though, had some good details. I liked the textures the most, from what could be seen.
I don’t think those who don’t believe in the moon landing will be convinced by this, there’s a variety of excuses they could possibly give to skirt having to admit it.
1). The GI algorithm is wrong
2). Nvidia used the wrong material properties for the lunar soil and the lander (if we never went to the moon, how do we know the actual material properties of lunar dust?).
3). Nvidia is in cahoots with the government to spread propaganda (possibly a favorite).
4). The aliens that help the government run the underground bases have time travel technologies and used the Maxwell architecture in the 60’s
5). The government had secret quantum computing devices back then that simulated the exact same results we see today
Many of them also believe in top secret technologies at a level that would make Captain Kirk and Darth Vader blush, you can’t win against these guys because they have a thousand more excuses lined up when you debunk one.
Yep, expectations are always high but I’ve been consistently underwhelmed. I’m recalling the hype around Tiatan Z just a few months ago and what did they deliver? Something that makes you just shake your head in disbelief!!! Anyway, I guess the price performance ratio of the 900 series is moving in the right direction - trouble is its snail paced incremental product releases as ALWAYS …
AMD may very well have to kiss its GPU division goodbye and give Nvidia the monopoly it’s seeking if it can’t figure out a way to respond, as these are far superior to their current generation of cards or even the next one in terms of power consumption, temperature, and performance. Amazon is also showing evidence that the cards are flying off the shelves with many vendor models either out of stock or about to be.
People are saying that this will be the easiest purchase decision they’ve been given in years.
I’m really interested in 980, since I’ve got an hold 5870 AMD. I’m a bit disappointed it seems like 580, however I guess I’ll wait a little bit longer and then I’l buy 980.
Just want to point out to anyone getting these cards considering that probably most people on here will be doing so for cycles the max TDP they advertise is for gaming (even then the power draw exceeds this value). For compute performance Toms hardware showed that both the 970 and 980 exceed there TDP by nearly 100 watts.
Here’s the power consumption overview for anyone who is interested,
I just ordered a 970 - how long do you think it may be before there are sm_52 builds? I’ll be dying to try cycles!
I’ve never had such a good card so I don’t know how long it’s taken the blender build process to catch up with these things?
, the 285 watt for GTX 980 was expected, because my GTX 780 is doing 400 watt when rendering “without OC”