Conclusion

First of all we have a quick chat about prices. These days a reference GTX Titan still costs 850 Euro. Compare that to the 495 Euro you have to pay for the cheapest reference GTX 980 you can find and you’ll notice the GTX TITAN is about 72 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 19 percent quicker in FireStrike Performance and Ultra than the GTX Titan, and 18 percent faster when running FireStrike Extreme. In the next theoretical test we ran, Unigine Heaven, we see that the GTX 980 is on average less than 20 percent quicker in 1080p, 14 percent when running 1440p and 19 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. Overall the almost two years younger GTX 980 is faster by quite a margin, although the GTX Titan features 6 Gigabyte VRAM and the GTX 980 comes with only 4 Gigabyte. Even though more memory helps with extremely high resolutions, that alone doesn't make it possible for the GTX Titan to keep up with the GTX 980. When running 1080p resolution we see that the GTX 980 is quite a lot faster than the GTX Titan in all 13 games we have in our charts. One game that shows significant difference is GRID Auto Sport, where we see a 61 percent performance gap at 2160p, 51 percent when we set 1440p and 37 percent in 1080p. Checking Metro Last Light, the GTX 980 is about 52 percent faster than the GTX Titan in 1080p, close to 40 percent in 1440p and checking 2160p we find 33 percent difference. Having a closer look at Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare at 1080p and 1440p shows the GTX 980 is about 35 percent ahead and there is a nice 26 percent difference in 2160p. Sniper Elite 3 reveals a 36 percent gap in 1080p, 31 percent in 1440p and 58 percent in 2160p. Apart from that it’s the same story for Far Cry 4, where the difference is about 20 percent on average.
Last but no least we also had a look at power consumption and we noticed that the test system with GTX Titan burns 8 percent more power in Idle. Under load the difference shoots up to a whopping 46 percent.

If you’re thinking about upgrading from a GTX Titan 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 Titan is still a seriously quick graphics card and more than capable of pumping out high frame rates. Although the GTX Titan has more VRAM onboard than the GTX 980, the new Maxwell GPU architecture is faster by quite a margin. Should you have bought a GTX Titan for its capabilities to accelerate professional applications, then the GTX 980 would be a downgrade, since this consumer class card does not support acceleration of professional applications.

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