In the past few weeks we were busy discussing whether NVIDIA will release the GeForce GTX 800 family of products or it will skip it to directly go to the GTX 900 line. Things became clear a few days ago when we discovered that the GTX 800 line has been renamed to GTX 900 with no explanation whatsoever but there’s more – NVIDIA will release at least three GTX 900 cards very soon.
There’s probably no need to say that the GTX 900 line will include the long-awaited high-performance Maxwell models and there will be at least two of them – the GeForce GTX 980 and GeForce GTX 970. The GTX 980 will be the flagship model as of now – the card will have 2048 CUDA cores which is more than the previously thought 1920 cores. The 2048 CUDA cores will be spread in 16 Streaming Multiprocessor Maxwell (SMM) units. As a comparison, its sibling the GTX 970 will have 1664 stream processors in 13 SMMs. The TDP of the GTX 980 is said to be 175 watts, while the GTX 970 will have TDP of 145 watts. This is good news considering that the GK104 chip used in the GeForce GTX 770 has TDP of 230 watts. Given that the GM204 chip in the GTX 980/970 uses the same 28 nm process, this means that the new Maxwell generation will have some excellent power efficiency. Both GTX 980 and GTX 970 models are expected on September 19.
Next month NVIDIA will also release the GeForce GTX 960, which will be a sub-$300 video card. The exact specs of the card are unknown as of now. The GTX 960 will come out in mid-to-late October 2014.
Source: Videocardz.com