GeForce GTX 980 Whitepaper
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Conclusion
GeForce GTX 980 was designed to deliver extreme gaming performance with unprecedented levels of
power efficiency. It’s the fastest GPU we’ve ever built, yet its TDP is just 165 watts. The Maxwell GPU
inside the GeForce GTX 980 is built on the same 28-nm manufacturing process used for previous
GeForce GPUs—this means that the GPU’s remarkable performance and efficiency doesn’t come from
the smaller transistors you get with a die shrink, rather these benefits come from the new GPU
architecture.
Maxwell GPUs feature a completely revamped chip topology that’s been optimized to provide record-
breaking performance per watt. The Maxwell SM is grouped into four separate CUDA core processing
blocks, each with its own dedicated resources for scheduling and instruction dispatch. With double the
PolyMorph Engines, geometry and tessellation performance is significantly improved. Finally, with
double the ROPs, and enhanced compression algorithms, the GeForce GTX 980 delivers exceptional
performance with MSAA.
When it comes to AA, the GeForce GTX 980 has been tailored to offer the crispest visuals available on
the PC. The GeForce GTX 980 supports new features for sampling control that will enable new AA
techniques like MFAA, allowing lower level AA sample patterns to be perceived as higher quality AA, but
with the faster performance of lower AA levels. And the GeForce GTX 980 supports Dynamic Super
Resolution technology, an NVIDIA-developed version of downsampling that brings 4K visuals to existing
1080p displays without the configuration hassles or IQ bugs that currently exist with downsampling
today.
Real-time global illumination as seen in Epic’s UE4 ‘Elemental’ tech demo has been on the wish list of
game developers for years, but has remained impractical—Epic chose to remove their Sparse Voxel
Octree Global Illumination (SVOGI) implementation to produce the ‘Infiltrator’ tech demo that was
released the next year. With VXGI, the GeForce GTX 980 can render global illumination radically faster
than prior GPUs, making the lighting seen in the Elemental tech demo more feasible for the next
generation of PC games.
Offering built-in support for HDMI 2.0, the GeForce GTX 980 is ready for gaming on the latest big
screens.
Thanks to its revolutionary Maxwell architecture, the GeForce GTX 980 is the perfect upgrade for
gamers who want to enjoy the hottest new games shipping at the end of 2014 and well into the future.
It’s the most advanced GPU ever made.
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