GTX Titan vs. GTX 980:

[abbazamma]

As many of you are aware the prices for the standard GTX Titan is significantly dropping constantly and is around the same price as the GTX 980 on eBay. I have been saving some money to put away for one or the other but I would like to know which one is actually better, not price for performance wise. Is the GTX Titan better than the GTX 980 FPS wise?

 

[rhysiam]

Have a look at these benchmarks: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1351?vs=1060

The 980 is consistently faster, by a good margin while consuming far less power... and presumably you'd be buying it new rather than second hand.

The Titan is by no means a bad card, and it has certain compute features which blow the 980 out of the water, but if they're similarly priced and you have no need of the additional compute features (games don't use them), the 980 is a substantially better card.

 

[Andrei123]

Titan X or just the Titan ? If it's the Titan X then go for it , 12GB of VRam will be very useful , 4GB of Vram is barely enough for 1080p ultra nowadays. Also from which GPU are you upgrading ? What PSU have you got ?

 

[rhysiam]

Titan X or just the Titan ? If it's the Titan X then go for it , 12GB of VRam will be very useful , 4GB of Vram is barely enough for 1080p ultra nowadays. Also from which GPU are you upgrading ? What PSU have you got ?

On what are you claiming that 1080p pushed 4GB VRAM? I'd be happily corrected if you have benchmarks/reviews to back you up, but I do not believe that's true at all.

Here's a article pitting CFX 290X 4GB vs 8GB at 4K.
http://www.tweaktown.com/tweakipedia/68/amd-radeon-r9-290x-4gb-vs-8gb-4k-maxed-settings/index.html
They conclude that there's very little difference and even for crossfire and 4K gaming the price difference doesn't justify the additional RAM. They did produce one benchmark where the 8GB pulled significantly ahead, but that was running 200% super-sampling, or 8K resolution... that's equivalent to 16 1080p screens (they say it's 8 1080p screens, but my understanding is that super sampling increases the resolution across two axis... so should be 16 x 1080p... but even if it's 8 times 1080p, my point stands).
If it's hard to justify at 4K, then I'd suggest going above 4GB VRAM for 1080p will offer very little for the next couple of years.

Again, I'm happy to be corrected on this if you have benchmarks or articles that suggest otherwise, but my understanding is that 4GB is at very least plenty, and in many cases overkill for 1080p gaming, ultra or otherwise.

 

[GregoryDude]

Titan X is better than the 980 and the Titan Z is not (for gaming at least).

If it's the Titan X, I'd go with that - at 12GB vram, it will do excellent with 4k gaming and althought the Titan Z has 12gb vram it is more for rendering/3d computing rather than raw gaming. The 980ti and 390x are VERY close on the horizon so expect a price drop on the GTX 980 if that's the route you want to go. I don't think the Titan X will drop in price anytime soon though. Stay away from the Z or the original gtx titan when it comes to gaming they are outperformed by the 980.

 

[chenw]

Titan X or just the Titan ? If it's the Titan X then go for it , 12GB of VRam will be very useful , 4GB of Vram is barely enough for 1080p ultra nowadays. Also from which GPU are you upgrading ? What PSU have you got ?

On what are you claiming that 1080p pushed 4GB VRAM? I'd be happily corrected if you have benchmarks/reviews to back you up, but I do not believe that's true at all.

Here's a article pitting CFX 290X 4GB vs 8GB at 4K.
http://www.tweaktown.com/tweakipedia/68/amd-radeon-r9-290x-4gb-vs-8gb-4k-maxed-settings/index.html
They conclude that there's very little difference and even for crossfire and 4K gaming the price difference doesn't justify the additional RAM. They did produce one benchmark where the 8GB pulled significantly ahead, but that was running 200% super-sampling, or 8K resolution... that's equivalent to 16 1080p screens (they say it's 8 1080p screens, but my understanding is that super sampling increases the resolution across two axis... so should be 16 x 1080p... but even if it's 8 times 1080p, my point stands).
If it's hard to justify at 4K, then I'd suggest going above 4GB VRAM for 1080p will offer very little for the next couple of years.

Again, I'm happy to be corrected on this if you have benchmarks or articles that suggest otherwise, but my understanding is that 4GB is at very least plenty, and in many cases overkill for 1080p gaming, ultra or otherwise.

There may be other issues at play for the extra VRAM not benefiting 290x's at all, namely GPU power, most of the games they tested don't even use 4GB VRAM.

CoD:AW is a major VRAM hog even at 1080p. It is the only one I know of, but it's an offender.

 

[rhysiam]

There may be other issues at play for the extra VRAM not benefiting 290x's at all, namely GPU power, most of the games they tested don't even use 4GB VRAM.

CoD:AW is a major VRAM hog even at 1080p. It is the only one I know of, but it's an offender.

The 290X is not that far behind a GTX 980 in terms of processing power, and crossfire 290Xs (which they tested) is faster than both a 980 and even a Titan X (when drivers allow for proper scaling - I'm not suggesting for a second that 290X CF > Titan X). CF 290X @ 4K is a hell of a lot of processing and the fact that it made little to now difference at 4K suggests that 1080p is a breeze for 4GB VRAM.

I'm not familiar with Cod:AW, so you may be right there. But just bear in the mind that using GPU-Z or whatever to measure VRAM in use does not give you an accurate indication of what VRAM you actually need. This has come up heaps in regards to people's concerns about the 970 and VRAM usage. The thing that people constantly forget is that any decently coded game is aware of how much VRAM is has and will fill all or most of it if it can. There's absolutely no point have "empty" VRAM, you can overwrite data just as quick as you can write it. Many games will load or leave resources in VRAM just in case you need them again, occasionally it saves you having to reload resources so you may a well. Windows (and OSX & Linux) does exactly the same thing with your system RAM. That's why the Windows Task Manager reports "Free" memory and "Available" memory, the latter being RAM which is currently holding cached data but which can be immediately jettisoned (it doesn't need to be saved/written anywhere) if required, it's simply being left in RAM as a just-in-case-it's-needed. GPUs more or less do the same thing with VRAM. Heaps of people look up the VRAM usage and see "3.8GB" and think they're approaching or bumping up against their VRAM limit, when in reality it's just the program making the best use of available resources. In many of those cases the game only needs half or even less of the data in VRAM in order to render frames without paging to system RAM (which will and does absolutely tank system performance), the rest of the data is there just-in-case.

That explains why the memory segmentation issue on the GTX 970 is not nearly as big as an issue in reality as it seems (though it was still poor form on NVIDIA's part IMHO), and why a card like the 2GB GTX 960 is still relatively competent at 1080p at the moment. I do think the 960 is a little light on VRAM for future, but for now it manages okay and I'd suggest a 4GB card is perfectly adequate for 1080p.

This ended up longer than intended and possibly off topic - so apologies for that.

OP - As my first post states, 980 is definitely superior to original Titan (for gaming), though as others have raised, a Titan Z or Titan X is a different story. Given you were talking about EBay I'm assuming you're referring to the original Titan in which case the 980 is the better card (for gaming), no contest.