AMD Radeon HD 6870 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti is an end-of-life desktop graphics card that released in Q2 2015 with a MSRP of $649. It is built on the Maxwell 2.0 GPU microarchitecture (codename GM200) and is manufactured on a 28 nm process.

Memory

The GTX 980 Ti has 6 GB of GDDR5 memory, with a 1,753 MHz memory clock and a 384 bit interface. This gives it a memory bandwidth of 336.6 Gb/s, which affects how fast it can transfer data to and from memory. GPU memory stores temporary data that helps the GPU with complex math and graphics operations. More memory is generally better, as not having enough can cause performance bottlenecks.

Cores and Clock Speeds

The GTX 980 Ti includes 2,816 CUDA cores, the processing units for handling parallel computing tasks. The GPU operates at a core clock speed of 1,000 MHz and can dynamically boost its clock speed up to 1,076 MHz. Complementing the processing units are 176 texture mapping units (TMUs) for efficient texture filtering and 96 render output units (ROPs) for pixel processing.

Compatibility & Power Consumption

The GTX 980 Ti occupies 2 PCIe expansion slots. It supports DVI, HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.2 display connections. NVIDIA recommends a power supply of at least 600 W to handle the GPU's thermal design power (TDP) of 250 W.

Benchmark Performance & Value

The GTX 980 Ti has the 101st best 3DMark 11 Performance GPU score among the 543 benchmarked GPUs in our database. It achieves 22.04% of the performance of the best benchmarked GPU, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090. Its 23,057 score and $649 launch price (MSRP) gives it a performance per dollar of 35.53. This is the 74th best in value for the 3DMark 11 Performance GPU benchmark.