Conclusion

Having a quick look at the results shows, there are sometime even drastic advantages towards the GTX 980 Ti. At FullHD the 980 Ti is on average 38.6% quicker than the 960 SLI and at 1440p the difference is 59.8%. Averaging the two resolution values results in a 49.2% advantage towards the GTX 980 Ti and that accounts for a visible difference in games. If you're wondering why the GTX 980 Ti is pulling ahead especially at very high resolutions (UHD), that can be explained by the fact, that this card's 6 Gigabyte of VRAM is opening a bottleneck. You Might recall that the GTX 960 SLI features 2 Gigabyte of VRAM, which is simply not enough to buffer all data, when the card is being hit with UHD at high details. This is also the reason why we didn't even test the cards. Sometime you can even navigate through the ingame menues properly if you're using a 2GB card and run UHD.

Once more one thing becomes very clear at this point: 2GB cards simply can't run ultra high resolutions. If you own one 2GB GTX 960 and you'd be that adding a second one to your system will allow you to enjoy games at UHD, then we have to disappoint you. On the other hand it's rather likely that things would look different with two 4GB GTX 960's in SLI, which is actually something we're soon going to have a look at. In the case of 1080p and 1440p we see that the SLI of the two small cards is doing well, especially considering the cost factor. These days the two small cards cost approximately 383 Euro, whereas the 980 Ti accounts for a whopping 710 Euro. In other words this means, in order to get on average 49% more performance you have to pay 82% more money. Because of the very different amounts of VRAM this is like comparing apples and pears, since the GTX 980 Ti makes playing UHD possible.