First off I am a graphics designer not a hardware specialist, therefore my tests are not professional.
But sofar the 980 seems to be 15-25% slower which is a big bummer
This means one minute longer computing per frame on my test scene which is a huge dissappointment. Although several people have pointed out that this might be a drivers problem either on NVIDIA´s, EVGA´s or Octane´s side. I suppose the next weeks / months will show the true capabilites of the 980 GTX.Setup:
I ran the test on my 780ti superclocked first, then deinstalled all the drivers and the card itself, replaced it with the 980 GTX superclocked and installed the drivers again. So I ran every card single, that way it had the full x16 PCI express bandwith. Both cards ran on stock settings.
780ti 1006 MHZ with boost up to 1162MHZ
980 1239 MHZ with boost up to 1352
NVIDIA driver 344.11 (released on 19.09.2014)
I rendered a 5 frame sequence to avoid VRAM reloading issues.
FRAME__TIME 780ti__TIME 980
325_____4:06_____05:31
326_____3:45_____05:06
327_____3:45_____05:07
328_____3:42_____05:05
329_____3:44_____05:05
Conclusion:
One minute per frame faster rendering on my "old" 780ti is a critical number. Also because I did not run into VRAM issues yet and I plan to watercool it anyways I am going to stay with my 780ti.
The lower power consumption is not that big of an issue, because a 100 watt difference would only mean a 100€ higher power bill per year on 10 hours a day for 356 days which is unlikely to happen so its more like 50-100€ difference. (My power company takes 26,72 per kWh)
Hopes:
I hope NVIDIA will make GPU computing more feasible again for freelancers like me. I am looking into a tripple / quad EVGA 780ti SC setup again now.
