Looks like Videocardz has finally spilled the beans on the specs of the Maxwell Flagship, Geforce GTX 980. And its shaping up to validate the Chiphell leak we published a week ago. We can't release the die shot of the GPU for certain reasons this time, but if VCZ has posted this, you can be rest assured its true. Maxwell-GTX-980-

Maxwell Flagship Geforce GTX 980 Rocks 2048 CUDA Cores with 16 SMMs

As you already know both cards werelaunching on the 19th of September,12:01 AM PDT to be exact but thedate has now been moved one day earlier to 18th September at 7:30 PM PST. While the GTX 970 is completely ready, Nvidia was having some trouble with custom GTX 980 cards so there is a slight possibility that Custom GTX 980s will be delayed. The Geforce GTX 980 has 16 Streaming Maxwell Multiprocessors (SMM) which in turn have 128 CUDA cores each, bringing the total to 2048.

Since the wattage of the GTX 970 is 148W, the 980 should have a maximum of 180W TDP, although the actual number should be less. With 2048 Maxwell cores we are looking at more or less GTX 780 Ti performance at decent clocks and more at high clocks. Which once again validates the Chiphell leak I mentioned above. Sadly for performance minded enthusiasts (myself included) this means that Nvidia is chasing power efficiency. This, in my personalopinion, should not factor much in a high end product. On the GTX 970 die, you can notice the nomenclature GM204-200-A1, and as VCZ reveals, the nomenclature for the GTX 980 die will be GM204-400-A1. Both the 970 and the 980 feature two 6 Pin connectors, 256Bit Bus and 224GB/s of bandwidth. The leak scene for this generation of Nvidia products appear to be drawing to a close, but there is still the big launch to look forward to. And ofcourse the curious case of the GM200 GPU.

Update: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 SLI and OC Gaming Performance Numbers:

Chinese Baidu forums are leaking so much information and material regarding the GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 graphics cards that they have started taking action against such threads by removing them. Over at the forums, someone posted a performance chart of the GeForce GTX 980 (Denoted by the Unknown-2 label to avoid getting removed from the forums) which shows gaming numbers in 2560x1440P with maxed out AA and AAF in several current generation titles such as Watch Dogs, Battlefield 4: Dragon's Teeth, Bioshock Infinite, ARMA III, Batman: Arkham Origins and Metro Redux. From the numbers, we can see that the GeForce GTX 980 delivers an average 60.8 FPS at minor overclock speeds in the titles compared to 57.9 FPS on the GTX 780 Ti and 54.4 FPS on the Radeon R9 290X.

The SLI numbers show an increase to 103.3 FPS for the dual GTX 980's while the GTX 780 Ti and Radeon R9 290X deliver 97.6 and 96.9 FPS respectively at stock clocks. There are also extreme overclocked scenarios where the GeForce GTX 780 Ti ROG MATRIX scores 72.1 FPS compared to 67.1 FPS on the custom designed GTX 980 and 64.9 FPS on the Lightning Radeon R9 290X. GeForce GTX 980 Performance Numbers

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980 Specifications (What We Know So Far):

	GeForce GTX 480	GeForce GTX 580	GeForce GTX 680	GeForce GTX 780	GeForce GTX 780 Ti	GeForce GTX 970	GeForce GTX 980
Codename	GF100	GF110	GK104	GK110	GK110	GM204	GM204
Process	40nm	40nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm
GPU Core	Fermi	Fermi	Kepler	Kepler	Kepler	Maxwell	Maxwell
SM Units	15 x 32	16 x 32	8 x 192	12 x 192	14 x 192	13 x 128	16 x 128
CUDA Cores	480	512	1536	2304	2880	1664	2048
ROPS	48	48	32	48	48	TBC	64
TMUs	60	64	128	192	240	TBC	128
Core Clock	700 MHz	772 MHz	1006 MHz	863 MHz	875 MHz	1051 MHz	1126 Mhz
Boost Clock	1401 MHz (Shader Clock)	1544 MHz (Shader Clock)	1058 MHz	900 MHz	928 MHz	1178 MHz	1216 Mhz
Memory	1.5 GB GDDR5	1.5 GB GDDR5	2 GB GDDR5	3 GB GDDR5	3 GB GDDR5	4 GB GDDR5	4 GB GDDR5
Memory Bus	384-Bit	384-Bit	256-bit	384-Bit	384-Bit	256-bit	256-bit
Memory Clock	3.69 GB/s	4.0 GB/s	6.0 GHz	6.0 GHz	7.0 GHz	7.0 GHz	7.0 GHz
Memory Bandwidth	177.4 GB/s	192.4 GB/s	192.0 GB/s	288.6 GB/s	336.0 GB/s	224.5 GB/s	224.5 GB/s
Texture Fill Rate GT/s	42	49.41	128.8	166	210	145.0	TBC
TDP	250W	244W	192W	250W	250W	148W	165W
Power Connectors	8+6 Pin	8+6 Pin	6+6 Pin	8+6 Pin	8+6 Pin	6+6 Pin	6+6 Pin
DirectX 12 Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Launch	March 26th 2010	November 09 2010	March 22nd 2012	May 23rd 2013	December 2013	18th September 2014	18th September 2014
Price	$499 US	$499 US	$499 US	$499 US	$699 US	$299 Reference $329+ Custom	$549 Reference $549+ Custom

#Nvidia GTX 980 Specs. 2048 CUDA Cores. http://t.co/Mn0kCl0ZAa

— Usman Pirzada (@usmanpirzada) September 15, 2014