Review: NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 980 And GeForce GTX 970 Maxwell Powerhouse GPUs

NVIDIA has lifted the embargo on its latest flagship graphics cards based on their Maxwell GPU architecture, the GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970. The two cards are somewhat similar and share the same 4GB frame buffer and GM204 GPU, but the GTX 970’s GPU is clocked a bit lower and features fewer active SMs and CUDA cores. The GeForce GTX 980’s GM204 GPU has all of its functional blocks enabled and is the full implementation of the chip, however.


When you see the GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970’s specifications, you may scratch your head a bit and wonder how products with seemingly lower-end specs can replace powerhouses like the GeForce GTX 780 Ti and GTX 780, but rest assured they do. NVIDIA’s got a few tricks up their sleeve this time around and the end results are a couple of high-performance, highly-efficient graphics card that will be right at home in the fastest of systems...