Too tired to post much tonight but I fitted the new card an hour ago and have been playing The Witcher 3 (patched to v1.05). The game feels noticeably smoother on maxed out 1920x1200 settings with HairWorks set to All, holding 55-60 fps more often than the 40-45 fps I was getting previously with the GTX 980. Even the cutscenes with facial closeups hold 60 fps more often than not. I did see a drop to the mid-30s fps during the quest where Geralt thinks he is fighting stuffed animals come to life but that is down to HairWorks and the number of hairy animals on-screen. Never felt unplayable though. I did not even uninstall the drivers; I just swapped the cards and Windows detected the GTX 980 Ti and automatically installed the v353.06 drivers for it. I rebooted though just to be safe. I had to double-check I had fitted the right card though as the two looked so similar with the newer one only differing from the GTX 980 SC by virtue of having the word 'Ti' on it and no backplate (which is a shame as the GTX 980 Ti looks a little unfinished in comparison IMO). As mine is an SC model, the default clock is 1,102 MHz and is supposed to boost to 1,190 MHz. Mine however boosts to 1,304 MHz without any additional overclocking which is really awesome and only dropped down to 1,291 MHz while I was playing The Witcher 3. That is just 75 MHz lower than the speed my GTX 980 SC ran at (it too was not overclocked by me). Going to play lots of games over the weekend if The Witcher 3 will permit. Not sure I will be running many benchmarks though as I find them boring and would rather feel the difference for myself in real-world games. I may run a few though at some point but I'm sure they won't be of much interest to anyone else as my system is not overclocked (I value stability over gaining a few extra fps via overclocking).
I crumbled and phoned Scan UK to enquire about stock and reserved one on the phone. They are having some sort of release party on Saturday which sounds fun with cake and costumes and whatnot but actual stock should appear on the Monday... So I'm looking forward to an improvement from my 780Ti
Have you try to increase your res in TW3? 1080p for this monster seem to be a little "close". Remember to change again this value in bin\config\base\Rendering "HairWorksAALevel=8" for every patch release before perform each test.
May be worth buying 980s in UK and selling them in US. Do that a few times should cover the cost of my upgrade.
Figure my system with a 4.2-4.4 GHz OC and two 980 Ti's. I assumed that I'd need to replace my RM850 with a bigger PSU to run it all.
Unfortunately I experienced a couple of TDRs (driver has stopped responding and recovered errors) last night within minutes of playing Project CARS and Far Cry 4 using the v353.06 drivers. I left Watch_Dogs running for 4 hours completely maxed out with 4xTXAA etc and it was stable. I played an hour of The Witcher 3 too without issue. In all cases the card boosted to 1,291-1,304 MHz and temps (using my custom fan profile in Afterburner v4.1.1) were under 71 degrees C. I only had one TDR in the entire time I owned my GTX 980 SC and that was due to overclocking the card further. It was 100% stable on the default factory overclock. Now I may have had Chrome v43.0 open when those TDRs occurred; I definitely was not running it when I tested Watch_Dogs though. Thing is Chrome (with Hardware Acceleration on, obviously) never had any issues with the GTX 980 SC, though I generally do not leave browsers open while playing games. Steam, of course, is running in the system tray and that I believe using Chrome for its web pages. Will do some more testing today, including a few benchmarks. May also try reinstalling the v353.06 or even the v353.12 Hotfix driver if the problem persists.
P.S. For all the talk about 4 GB of VRAM being plenty; I saw Middle-earth: Shadows of Mordor use the full 6 GB last night while playing it with textures set to Ultra, though 5.6 GB was the average usage after 20 minutes. This is the first time I have been able to play this game 100% smoothly at those settings. Also GTA V maxed out with Grass set to Ultra and TXAAx4, etc, used 4.6 GB of VRAM as did Watch_Dogs. That is at 1920x1200 too!!! :3eyes:
Could this be in part to games loading as much into the vram over actually requiring it. I'm not saying they don't but I recall seeing something about cod filling the vram but running fine on cards with much less at the same settings. Grats though, can't wait for mine.
Vram allocation, it will use how much it sees available. CoD filled 10GB Vram on TX, cant find the video (randomdude84).
I am having problems applying settings in the NVIDIA Control Panel...keep getting an Access Denied error...seems I am not alone as others are reporting the same error with the v353.06 drivers. And GeForce Experience v2.4.5.28 refuses to open, depite uninstalling and reinstalling the standalone version...there's no error in the Event log either. With the TDR errors, I am beginning to regret having changed my card now...
Did you uninstall the old driver using uninstall? Did you just install the new driver over an older driver? Did you use DDU to clean out all the crap? Try driver 347.88, works great.
Does that driver even support the GTX 980 Ti? I ended up using DDU (excellent little utility) and did a completely clean install of the v353.06 driver and GFE now works but I am stilling getting the Access Denied error when applying settings in the NVIDIA control panel. It *did* work post-driver install but after a reboot the error returned. Unfortunately. Looks like a bug in this driver as there are lots of other people also reporting the issue with this version on the GeForce.com forum. As for the TDRs, well I don't want to jump the gun but after the DDU/clean install I have been able to play my games without this error occurring. I played The Witcher 3 for nearly six hours, Assassin's Creed Rogue for 30 minutes, Dead Rising 3 for 30 minutes (what is with the horrid indoor Shadow flickering on Medium/High setting in that game?), Metro Last Light Redux for an hour or so as well as a brief play of The Talos Principle, a race in DiRT Rally, etc, etc. The only weird thing was that The Witcher 3 and Metro Last Light both unexpectedly exited to the desktop without any error nor is there anything in the event log. It was as if I'd pressed Alt-F4 which I didn't as I was playing with an Xbox One controller! Prior to that I have had no crashes with The Witcher 3 in the 45+ hours or so I have been playing it. :3eyes:
...except ones that have Titan in their names! But, yes, I have bought cards from them every year since 1999 except for a brief stint with AMD when I bought two RADEON HD5870s for CFX rather than the GTX 480.