Maswell GM204 in Full Force: GTX 980, GTX 970 and the GTX 980M Unconfirmed Benchmarks pop up

Now nVidia shockingly decided to skip the GTX 800 line of GPUs and went a generation further to the GeForce 900 Series, I understand that is probably to make it more inline with the newest Architecture that primarily takes the form of the Maxwell Core that we've first seen in the GTX 750 Ti, GTX 750, the GTX 860M, GTX 850M and the GeForce 840M. The next couple of months we will see the full force of the GeForce 980 and the 970 and the 980M and the 970M.

In the meantime, leaked benchmarks have surfaced: And here they are. We'll go through the GPUs in detail.

GTX 980 and GTX 970

Now after looking at the benchmarks, now say if you're using a GTX 780 or a GTX 780 Ti, I would recommend you stick to what you're using because the upgrades don't produce a big FPS change. Overclocking your current cards which should be highly doable, would still net most of these scores that you can see across the board. Moreover, if memory serves, the GTX 980 operates on a weaker bus-width at 256-bit. However, it's interesting to note the Maxwell's massive upgraded 2MB Cache that we've seen in the 750 Ti and the GTX 860M means Memory speeds won't take that large of a hit. So it'll be intriguing to find how it runs in high-resolution displays like 4K 3840 x 2160 or Surround.

But summarily, the GTX 980 would be the card to replace the 780 Ti, and the GTX 970 for the GTX 780.

Quick Specs of Each Card:

GTX 980

Arrangement Core: 2560:160:64 (Rumors CUDA Count is 1920)

Core Clock: 1050 MHz Boost

Memory Clock: 7.01 GHz

Memory: 4GB GDDR5

Bus Width: 256

Memory Bandwidth: 224 GB/s

GTX 970
Arrangement Core: 2304:128:64 (Rumors that CUDA Core is 1664)

Core Clock: 1050 MHz Boost

Memory Clock: 7.01 GHz

Memory: 4GB GDDR5

Bus Width: 256

Memory Bandwidth: 224 GB/S

MOBILE GTX 980M AND GTX 970M

Now these two GPUs are IMHO my stars in this one as you can tell by the benchmarks, The GTX 980M at stock performs just a thousand points under the GK-110 Core Based GTX 780 that I have. Now that's actually a crazily impressive score because it's quite close to the more power hungry DESKTOP card. It's leaps and bounds beyond the GTX 880M, even the GTX 970M still surpasses the 880M by a respectable margin. It's already impressive that a single GTX 980M is just a small fraction away from the Dual GTX 780Ms and will probably beat the 870Ms in SLI. And the SLI Config whoops SLI-ed GTX 770's butt big time, and is placed not far behind to the R9 295X2.

Now we've already known Maxwell to be already much more power efficient than the Kepler which was the designed to power optimize the Fermi Generation.

Specs are hard to come by at this point but we'll see as time goes on.

BOTTOM LINE

With that hype coming in, I hope the true benchmarks would be about within 10% of the scores when the actual stuff comes out. We'll know as soon as the GTX 980 (M) and GTX 970 (M) launches,