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From a performance perspective the GTX 980 has some positives and very few negatives. In games that can use the additional memory bandwidth, we can see decent performance scaling and margins over the GTX 780 Ti, and an even wider gap when compared to the R9 290X. The 3DMark results point to a card that is going to rewrite the record books by this weekend, if not tonight. Overall you do get a higher level of performance, but in some games the margin is almost non-existent over the GTX 780 TI. With base clock speeds of 1126MHz on the GM204 core that hits 1216MHz under Turbo Boost 2.0 speeds, and 1750MHz on the 4GB of GDDR5 memory, the GTX 980 comes right out of the gate with a pretty strong baseline performance level.
Overclocking with a baseline clock speed that high might lead you to the conclusion the architecture is tapped out, but you would be oh so terribly wrong. It's just the starting point for a card that, with very little tweaking, will run up and over 1400MHz on the core and hit right around the 2000MHz mark (8000MHz effective) on the memory. My sample card, with a small boost in core voltage, allowed me to run maximum clock speeds of 1469MHz on the core and 1979MHz on the GDDR5 memory fully stable; the two highest clock speeds I have ever reached on a video card on air or otherwise. With more voltage available I did not fully explore the maximum, but suffice to say there is more left in the card depending on how you overclock and manage the thermals. That boost in clock speed was good for almost 1000 points above the GTX 780 Ti in 3DMark using the Extreme preset.
As far as gaming performance is concerned, the GTX 980 can play pretty much any game out today running a resolution of 2560x1440. With a compromise in settings, the card can run 3840x2160 without a hitch, especially when using NVIDIA's upcoming MFAA (Multi Frame Anti-Aliasing) technology to be available in an upcoming driver release. Overclocking will surely add to the performance metrics if you take the time to maximize the core clock speeds.
http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/nvidia_gtx_980/
