Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Review

Conclusion

Without doubt, the GTX 980 is a great graphics card. By and large, it is unmatched in the performance arena, and there's certainly nothing that even comes close to it at this end of the market when you look at performance per watt. It is also very well crafted and it looks and feels like a true premium product.

Of course, it has to be said that performance per watt is not always a great concern in the enthusiast desktop space, especially at this high end of the market, but equally we're certain that the GTX 980's efficiency and overclocking credentials are going to win over a good number of people, especially those who are interested in quiet computing and/or small form factor builds, as here the lowered heat output is highly beneficial. These are also two areas that are not well suited to the hot-running and power hungry AMD Hawaii-based cards.


With all that said, we can't ignore the pricing. The MSRP puts the GTX 980 at £429, which is a serious amount of cash to splash on a single GPU; we think it would have looked far more appealing had Nvidia managed to get it to below £400. As it stands, it's good value compared to the GTX 780 Ti, which still retails for around £460, though only a fool would consider the GTX 780 Ti a benchmark for good value. Meanwhile, the GTX 780 and R9 290X tend to go for about £330, though some are even closer to the £300 mark. This means the GTX 980 would need to offer performance that was consistently 30 percent higher than these cards to be aligned with their value. As we saw, in a handful of cases, it does do so, but the majority of times it does not; the advantage is likely to be closer to half that, especially when you're playing at the higher resolutions these cards are designed for.

Still, performance isn't all that you're paying for. There's the efficiency for one thing, but also new technologies and future proofing in the form of things like the, HDMI 2.0, multiple DisplayPort outputs, H.265 encoding, G-Sync (though bear in mind AMD's FreeSync movement is picking up traction and support) and hardware acceleration of exciting new graphics processing techniques, including DirectX 12 features.


Essentially, if you can afford to, and you buy this card, you're going to receive it and be one happy bunny. However, if you're chasing value for money, then it's not your best option; you'll definitely want to take a look at our round-up of three GTX 970 cards right here though.