NVIDIA Launches The GTX 980: The High-End Maxwell Beauty

This morning NVIDIA lifted the lid on the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980 graphics cards as the new high-end offerings based on their extremely promising Maxwell architecture.

The GeForce GTX 980 features 2048 CUDA cores, 1126MHz base clock frequency, 1216MHz Boost clock frequency, 4GB of GDDR5 video memory, and requires just two six-pin external PCI-E power connectors thanks to the greater power efficiency of Maxwell. The GeForce GTX 970 has 1664 CUDA cores, 1050MHz base clock frequency, 1178MHz Boost frequency, and 4GB of GDDR4 video memory. The GTX 980 is launching today for $549 and the GTX 970 for $329 USD.

The GTX 970/980 look great and early indications for Windows gamers is that AMD can't come close to matching the performance of these high-end Maxwell graphics cards. My GTX 970 and GTX 980 review samples should be arriving next week from NVIDIA so I'll put these beauties through an onslaught of Linux tests for OpenGL and compute, etc. I'll reserve commenting more on these first GeForce GTX 900 series graphics cards until the samples have arrived and I've had more time to try them out under Linux.

You can learn more on these new high-end Maxwell graphics cards at NVIDIA.com.