The $649 price may also be a canny attempt to head AMD off at the pass. Absent such a feature, it’s not clear how much of a market there is for the more powerful card, now that the 980 Ti so closely matches it. Had the company left this feature intact on Titan X, it would give the card a unique capability that the 980 Ti can’t match. When Nvidia launched the original Titan, they chose to give it full-speed double-precision floating point capabilities that made the card attractive to anyone who wanted FP64 horsepower, but couldn’t afford to buy a Tesla card.

If you’re planning to make the jump to 4K in the near future, that extra memory and the additional performance may be worth the higher cost. While the price is 22% higher, the GTX 980 Ti outperforms its lower-end rival by an average of 22% in 1080p and 26% in 4K. Between the GTX 980 at $529 and the GTX 980 Ti at $649, there’s a definite argument to make in favor of the higher-end card. This introduces a bit of a wrinkle into the purchase argument, since 4K gaming definitely requires more RAM.

With that said, however, we’re also on the cusp of a resolution transition, with the price of 4K displays falling significantly year-over-year. Right now, I think 4GB of RAM is enough for high-end GPUs whether they use GDDR5 or HBM and I generally don’t recommend trying to “future proof” hardware purchases. The GTX 980 Ti is so good, in fact, one wonders if there’s any reason (beyond bragging rights) to buy a Titan X at all. There’s been a great deal of chatter the last few months over whether or not 4GB of RAM is enough for high-end gaming, spurred partly by the GTX 970’s 3.5GB limit and partly by the news that AMD’s upcoming Fiji is a 4GB card. That’s significantly different than what we saw in 2013, where the GTX 780 launched a few months after Titan, but the latter retained a significant performance advantage. The card offers most of the performance of its high-end counterpart, but at a much better overall price - you’re paying 65% as much, but getting about 98% of Titan X’s performance. The GTX 980 Ti fits into the same performance niche relative to Titan X as the GTX 780 did relative to the original Titan.

Metro last light benchmark gtx 980 ti