NVIDIA release GTX 980M and GTX 970M

Published: October 7, 2014 9:32 PM /

By:


gtx-980m-3qtr

Nvidia released today the GTX 980M and the GTX 970M, their two new flagship mobile GPUs.

The 980M can count on 1536 CUDA cores running at 1038MHz base clock to draw your frames, while its memory slowly chugs along at a meager 625MHz, that over its GDDR5 bus become 2.5GT/s. Coupled with a bus width of 256b, the total memory bandwidth is 160GB/s, which compared to its desktop counterpart is underwhelming but still better than AMD's R9 M290X, which hits 153.6GB/s. The tables are turned on the mobile front, it seems.

Moving over to the smaller sibling, we can see that it whips its 1280 horses at the more relaxed pace of 924MHz base frequency, and while the VRAM's clock and kind of bus are the same as the 980M, the narrower width of the bus, 192b, shrinks the memory bandwidth down to 120GB/s.

When it comes to common features, we have the usual Optimus support, improved Battery Boost which imposes frame rate caps at the driver level, Shadowplay, and DirectX 12, among other things. The highest supported resolution, available through eDP and Multimode DisplayPort, is of 3840x2160. Keep in mind, though, that in certain cases the actual maximum resolution could be limited by your laptop's IGP. The standard set of H.264, VC1 and MPEG2 FHD video streams is also hardware-accelerated, for the joy of your battery, but I lament the absence of H.265 (aka HEVC) from the list.

These two new GPUs are available right now in select laptop models from ASUS and MSI.

Sources:

NVIDIA blog release

GTX 980M spec sheet

GTX 970M spec sheet

Have a tip, or want to point out something we missed? Leave a Comment or e-mail us at tips@techraptor.net