While we are just days away from the official launch of the new Nvidia Geforce 900 series graphics cards, the Geforce GTX 980 and the Geforce GTX 970, today we have the full details of the flagship GTX 980.
The info comes courtesy of Videocardz.com, which managed to get a hold of what appears to be the full press materials for the GTX 980 launch. We now know that the GTX 980 will be based on a fully enabled GM204 GPU. The GM204 is made on 28nm manufacturing process, packs 5.2 billion transistors and has a die size of 398 mm2.
The two biggest surprises regarding the GM204 GPU are that it actually packs 2048 CUDA cores, and not 1920 as rumoured, as well as 64 ROPs. The GM204 is split into four Graphics Processing Clusters (GPCs), each GPC with four Streaming Multiprocessor Maxwell (SMM) unit, which adds up to 2048 CUDA cores. The GTX 970 is based on the same GPU but has 13 SMMs, for a total of 1664 CUDA cores. The rest of the specifications of the GM204 include 2M of L2 cache, 128 TMUs and 256-bit memory interface.
The base GPU clock of the reference GTX 980 graphics card will be set at 1126MHz while the Boost clock is set at 1216MHz. The reference GTX 980 will feature 4GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1750MHz (7000MHz effective). The TDP is set at 165W and it will feature 6+6-pin PCI-Express power configuration.
The big surprise are also five display outputs, including DVI-I, HDMI 2.0 and three Displayport 1.2 outputs.
Nvidia's GM204 Maxwell GPU will also bring some new features including Dynamic Super Resolution, a new upscaling technology that should bring "4k quality on a 1080p display"; Third Generation Color Compression, which increases memory efficiency; and Multi-Pixel Programmable Sampling, a technology that will improve sample randomizations and reduce quantization artifacts.
In case you missed it earlier, the GTX 980 and the GTX 970 are both expected to launch on September 18th, 7:30 PM PDT, at the Nvidia Game24 event.