Conclusion

First of all we have a quick chat about prices. These days a reference GTX 780 Ti costs 415 Euro. Compare that to the 495 Euro you'd have to pay for the cheapest reference GTX 980 you can find and you’ll notice the GTX 980 is about 20 percent more expensive.

To dive a bit deeper into the results, we start with performance differences in 3DMark graphics score where we see that the GTX 980 is 5 percent quicker in FireStrike Performance and Extreme than the GTX 780 Ti, and 7 percent faster when running FireStrike Ultra. In the next theoretical test we ran, Unigine Heaven, we see that the GTX 980 is on average less than 1 percent quicker in 1080p, 2 percent when running 1440p and 3 percent using our 2160p preset. In the case of games it turns out that the performance differences highly depend on the resolution combined with details level. In other words we see that the GTX 780 Ti’s memory is the bottlenecking factor, since 3 Gigabyte are simply not enough for UHD with high levels of detail. When running 1080p resolution we see that the GTX 980 is faster in all 13 games we have in our charts but not by much. One games that shows significant difference is Sniper Elite 3, where the GTX 980 is about 28 percent faster than the GTX 780 Ti in 1080p as well as 1440p and checking 2160p we find 24 percent difference. Having a closer look at Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare at 1080p and 1440p shows the GTX 980 is about 15 percent ahead and there is nice 38 percent difference in 2160. A closer look at Metro Last Light reveals an 18 percent gap in 1080p, 12 percent in 1440p and 25 percent in 2160p. Apart from that it’s the same story for Far Cry 4, where the difference is about 16 percent nn avrage.

Overall the GTX 780 Ti is performing well and there is no doubt the older generation of NVIDIA high-end cards still pack some serious punch. Since it's rather clear that 3 Gigabyte GDDR5 memory is not enough to run 2160p smoothly we would have been very curious to see how a GTX 780 Ti with 4 Gigabyte VRAM stacked up against the GTX 980 with the same amount of VRAM. Last but no least we also had a look at power consumption and we noticed that the test system with GTX 780 Ti burns 18 percent more power. Under load the difference shoots up to a whopping 41 percent.

If you’re thinking about upgrading from a GTX 780 Ti to a GTX 980 we can tell you that this only makes sense if you’re planning on playing games at ultra high resolutions. In all other scenarios the GTX 780 Ti is still a seriously quick graphics card and more than capable of pumping out high frame rates. The reason why the GTX 780 Ti can’t keep up with the GTX 980 is actually the amount of VRAM, which has been put on the cards. For UHD 3 Gigabyte VRAM is simply not enough, which is why the GTX 980 with 4 Gigabyte pulls ahead.

Page 1 - Test Setup	Page 11 - Thief
Page 2 - 3DMark Fire Strike	Page 12 - GRID Autosport
Page 3 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 13 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 4 - Borderlands - The Pre-Sequel	Page 14 - Metro Last Light
Page 5 - BattleField 4	Page 15 - Assassin's Creed Unity
Page 6 - Watch Dogs	Page 16 - Far Cry 4
Page 7 - Tomb Raider	Page 17 - Power Consumption
Page 8 - Sniper Elite 3	Page 6 - Prices
Page 9 - Crysis 3	Page 19 - Performance Index
Page 10 - Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare	Page 20 - Conclusion