Nvidia senior product director talks GTX 970/980, Maxwell, VR support and more

Nvidia kicked off its GAME24 event with an address from co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, who unveiled the company's latest line of graphics cards. The GeForce GTX 970 and 980 cards will utilize the new Maxwell SM Architecture, which Nvidia is calling its most advanced GPU ever made.

Maxwell brings a lot to the PC gaming table. The new Maxwell memory architecture uses third generation delta compression for highly-compressed colors with reduced memory traffic. PhysX FleX sees objects behave according to the first rules of physics, most notably with fluid objects. Dynamic Super Resolution will allow compressed 4K resolution to be displayed on 1080p resolution monitors. And of course, there's built-in VR support.

To learn more about what the new line of GeForce GTX cards are capable of, Shacknews spoke to senior product manager Justin Walker. In addition to asking about the new cards, I also asked whether the new cards are worthy of an investment from anyone that may have purchased a GeForce card more recently.

"For sheer performance, power, and efficiency, it's a 2X upgrade over our previous generation architecture," Walker told Shacknews. "From generation to generation, the 2X increase in performance is a pretty big deal. It's one of the biggest increases we've ever had."

A major drawing point is the new VR capabilities. Nvidia is looking to jump head-first into this growing trend, with the new cards looking to fully optimize the virtual reality experience.

"It's something that we've been working on for a little while," Walker added. "All we did was take a look at VR in its current state and say, 'We're driving the images onto this display, we should be able to do this in a way that's much more pleasurable to someone that's using this device.' These are all techniques that we know from graphics rendering and we've had a lot of experience with things like 3D Vision, which is taking a 3D stereoscopic image and putting it on a screen. Virtual reality still uses a stereoscopic technique, so a lot of what we learned from that, we were able to easily apply. On top of that, some of our technologies like SLI, MFAA, and DSR can be designed to run on virtual reality."

Walker notes that the goal with virtual reality, as with any other corner of PC gaming, is to reduce as much latency as possible. That'll be one of the company's focuses going forward, beyond its new line of cards.

"Performance is a big deal," Walker added. "The resolution of the displays, it's always good to see that go up. Our DSR technology helped out with that a lot, because you can get a higher-fidelity display on the existing hardware. All the work we've been doing with asynchronous warp to help pull latency out of it, those are key to a good VR experience."

One of the eye-opening aspects of the new GTX cards is the price tag, given what the cards appear to be capable of. Graphics cards are typically on the pricier side, but at $549 for the 980 and $329 for the 970, the new line of Nvidia cards appear surprisingly affordable. Walker attributes the relative low prices to the card's overall capabilities.

"It's all about efficiency," he said. "When we talk about architectural efficiency, we talk about power efficiency, but we're also talking about new techniques that allow us to pack more performance into a smaller area. That's essentially what makes the GPU a little more affordable. You've heard us talk a bit about how we're able to get more performance per core. We've been able to do that through better workload management and on the GPU, we've implemented a bunch of improvements in efficiency in the memory subsystem. That essentially allows us to design a chip that's affordable, but still offers high performance."

Many of our Shacknews community members are picky with their graphics cards, so they'll be happy to hear that the GTX 970 will support 3-way SLI and the GTX 980 will support 4-way SLI. Of course, they'll still be wondering whether the new cards are worth an upgrade from the more recent Titan and 770ti cards. Walker notes that the new line of cards will be more for those that haven't made this kind of plunge in recent years.

"Titan, 770, and all those are fantastic graphics cards and I'm pretty sure those folks that have them are pretty happy with them," Walker said. "This is certainly better compared to that: better performance, power efficiency, new features like DSR and MFAA are going to give them superior performance. But you know, I think the folks that are really going to be interested in this are folks with a 680 class of graphics card. Those are the ones who are going to see a dramatic improvement and I think those are the people that are going to look at this and say 'That's just going to make my game so much better.' A Titan, for example, sure, the 980 is definitely better than a Titan and somebody that would want to upgrade would be happy with it, but those are still pretty powerful graphics cards. I would bet most of those folks are pretty happy with it."

With the GTX 970 and 980 looking to be fairly powerful products, I could only wonder how much more powerful they could get. That led to the overclocking question. How much additional performance could these cards offer when overclocked?

"Obviously, your results may vary," Walker answered. "I've seen them go up a good 15 percent or so, in terms of overclocking. One of the good things about them is that, because they're so power efficient, you can overclock them and they're still whisper-quiet. Your thermals are not going to hold you back, fan noise is not going to be a problem, so you can push the thing as far as the silicon will let you go."

Nvidia's GeForce GTX 970 is available now for $329, while the GTX 980 will run for $549.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?