WINNER: Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti

URL: WWW.NVIDIA.COM

Ouch. That’s all I could think of when Nvidia released the GeForce GTX 980 Ti chipset to GPU makers in May of 2015. It was a double whammy of pain for many in the hardware community, firstly the poor bastards who had forked out $1600 for the Titan X. Just two months after spending big on the Titan X, the 980 Ti came out with basically identical speeds and feeds, though with half the onboard memory, for a whopping $500 less. Sure, that lack of memory didn’t help performance when running 4K games with stupidly high levels of antialiasing, but for everything else the two products were on par. Throw in overclocking, and the GTX 980 Ti actually performed better than the Titan X in many regards. Oh Nvidia, when will you learn to take care of your early adopters, aka whales?

But the company I felt really bad for was AMD, as the GTX 980 Ti was really just a spoiler to the biggest product launch AMD had lined up in years, the Radeon Fury X. If it wasn’t for the GTX 980 Ti, the Fury X would have been the best high-end gaming card of the year… but it wasn’t. The GTX 980 Ti managed to handily beat AMD’s uber-card in most of our benchmarks, a fact that wasn’t helped by the Fury X’s limited 4GB of onboard memory.

I reviewed several GTX 980 Ti products through the year, but two stood out as worthy of mention. MSI’s GTX 980TI Lightning was an overclocking behemoth, able to hit frequencies 20 to 30% higher than reference thanks to its high-quality build and beastly air cooler. And then Gigabyte delivered an even more capable beast, the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 Ti Xtreme Gaming WaterForce, which had builtin watercooling to allow super-easy overclocks. Both of these cards are still retailing for well over a grand, and I’m packing two GTX 980 Ti cards in SLI mode in my main gaming machine. I can testify that there isn’t a game out there that isn’t beaten to a pulp by NVIDIA’s killer chipset of 2015.