My NVIDIA Geforce GTX 660 Ti has been running strong for five years, but I had an opportunity to upgrade at an incredible price point this morning… so I bit. 🙂
I didn’t opt for the newest generation Pascal architecture cards (GTX 10xx series) because they’re not compatible with the MacOS portion of my rig. Instead, I sought one of the most powerful graphics cards supported by both MacOS and Windows 10 – the NVIDIA Geforce GTX 980 Ti. I also wanted to get the “reference” version of the 980 Ti with the fan at one end since this would not directly rest on top of my power supply unit (see images below) like the 660 Ti’s fans did.
The Unigine Heaven benchmark showed my frames per second (FPS) increasing from 20-30 on the 660 Ti to the upper 70s on the 980 Ti. Pretty incredible! I intend to use this upgrade as a stepping stone to ultimately transition to dual 4K monitors once they become more affordable.
Here’s a brief comparison of some of the technical specifications between the two GPUs:
| Specification | GTX 660 Ti | GTX 980 Ti |
|---|---|---|
| Memory | 2,048 MB | 6,144 MB |
| Pixel rate | 25.62 gigapixels/s | 96 gigapixels/s |
| Floating point performance | 2,459.5 gigaflops | 5,632 gigaflops |
| Render output processors | 24 | 96 |
| Clock speed | 915 MHz | 1,000 MHz |
| CUDA cores | 1,344 | 2,816 |
| Texture mapping units | 112 | 176 |
| Memory clock speed | 1,502 MHz | 1,753 MHz |
| Max power | 150 watts | 250 watts |
