nVidia has launched the first salvo in the impending VR GPU wars as it launched it’s newest graphics card, the GTX 980ti. The message from the GPU giant is clear: if you’re a gamer interested in either 4k or VR gaming, this is the card for you.
We knew when nVidia announced their suite of intended optimizations for VR back at GDC in March that we’d soon be getting hardware targetted towards VR enthusiasts. But nVidia has made sure with the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, a 6GB VRAM GPU running 2816 CUDA cores, that early adopters would not only want to exceed those recommended hardware specs dropped on us Oculus 2 weeks ago, but also have the ability to blow them out of the water with the SLI configurable graphics card that will take advantage of the company’s new vendor specific SDK, GameWorks VR.
For the uninitiated, that means multiple GPUs—or more succinctly—being able to assign multiple GPUs to each eye for accelerated stereo rendering. This particular feature has yet to be tested in the wild, so it’ll be interesting to see how performance scales as you add GPUs.
nVidia fans may have no problem immediately throwing down the $649 for a GPU that has been instilled with the subtitle “plays VR,” just $350 less than the undoubtedly beefy GTX Titan X, but there’s still no telling what AMD will bring to the table with their R9 300 series this month. Early benchmarks indicate that, to all intents and purposes, the 980ti is a Titan X barring the name and the largely inconsequential additional 6GB of VRAM. As such, the ti’s price is extremely aggressive, perhaps indicating that nVidia is expecting something special from their main rivals in the space, AMD.
Prudent VR enthusiasts looking to build a new rig, or upgrade an old one, would be advised to hold onto their wallets if only for a little while longer. AMD are expected to release more details on their forthcoming ‘Fiji’ based 390X card at E3 in a couple of weeks with a rumored retail release shortly thereafter.
GTX 980 Ti Specs:
- Maxwell 2 Architecture
- 2816 CUDA Cores
- 1000 Core Clock (MHz)
- 1075 Boost Clock (MHz)
- 7Gbps Memory clock
- GDDR5
- 4-way NVIDIA SLI
- NVIDIA G-Sync
- Microsoft DirectX 12 API with Feature Level 12.1
- OpenGL 4.5
- Windows 8 & 8.1, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Linux, FreeBSD x86OS
- 5120×3200 Max Digital Resolution
- 2048×1536 Max VGA Resolution
- 4.376 inches (height) 10.5 inches (length)
- 600 W minimum power requirement
For more detailed specs on the new nVidia Gefore GTX 980 Ti head over to nVidia’s official spec sheet.
