Difference between Titan and 980

[Chris Mathews]

I don't understand what the difference between a GTX Titan Z and GTX 980 is. The Titan is obviously /way/ more costly, but the 980 has almost double the clock speed. So which is more important, clock speed or VRAM? And what exactly does each of those do?

 

[TStahler]

I would advise the 980 to be the much better card. While the Titan has 6GB vRAM and the 980 has 4GB vRAM, the 980 is the much faster card.

vRAM is video memory. Certain games can utilize large amounts of it, such as Battlefield 3 and 4 because it is very graphic intensive. Speed and vRAM are both important. I think the key to a good graphics card is the same as to any computer system... Balance. The only way you could use 6GB vRAM is if you were gaming at very large resolutions. 4GB is plenty in pretty much all of todays games.

 

[hunter315]

The Titans have far better double precision floating point performance, the Titan Black and the 780 Ti are pretty well tied for everything except for the fact that the Titan Black has 8x the DPFP performance of the 780 Ti and ~12x that of the GTX 980. If you are gaming and not using your GPU for GPCompute applications then the DPFP performance does not impact you at all so go for the 980 instead.

 

[TStahler]

Running out of vRAM on a graphics card is much like when you run out of RAM doing non-graphic invasive computer tasks. If you run out of it, Your system will slow you down. Take the old 200 series GTX cards. The top cards only had 896mb of vRAM. The 400 series GTX cards had 1.25GB vRAM, and every new generation of card has increased from their to keep up with the more graphically demanding games. I am sure that if you buy a GTX 980, you will not be disappointed. I still think Titan prices are way over inflated. The only time the Titan would be a solid choice was if you were doing tons of adobe photoshop and rendering rather than any gaming. But, If the person wanted to even think a little bit about gaming, I would rather the 980 GTX hands down.