Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 specs have been leaked

In the lead up to the imminent launch of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 900 series, final specifications for the two top-end cards – the GTX 980 and GTX 970 – have been leaked thanks to VideoCardz.com. The GTX 980 flagship will reportedly come with 2,048 CUDA cores across 16 Streaming Multiprocessors Maxwell (SMM) units, up from the previously-rumored 1,920. It’ll also feature 4 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit bus, providing 224 GB/s of bandwidth, while the card’s TDP is listed at around 175 W. The TDP is especially interesting, considering it’s much lower than the previous generation. The Kepler-based GTX 780 with its GK110 GPU had a TDP of 250 W, so if these specifications are accurate, we’re looking at a 75 W drop in TDP in switching to a Maxwell architecture on the same 28nm fabrication node. In comparison, AMD’s Radeon R9 290X has a TDP of 290 W, so if the GTX 980 really does outperform it, it’ll be even more impressive when you consider the TDP is over 100 W lower.