780 Ti/4gb 980/8gb 980?

Hardware Hub GPU
1

So before I get started, I'm sorry if this has been asked before. I know people have asked the general question of "Should I get a 780Ti or the 980?" But I have a more in-depth question.

I'm looking to upgrade from my HD 6950 in the near future. With the 980 released, I'm very tempted to pick one up as soon as they're not sold out, but the price on 780 Ti's have dropped immensely and are selling for like $450; give or take. I know the 980 is supposed to be slightly faster than the 780 Ti, but it seems pretty negligible for the price difference at this point. What I'm more concerned about is the fact that there are supposed to be non-reference 980s with 8gb of vram coming out later on. I don't know if that's supposed to be around the end of this year or early next year though. I know 8gb is total overkill for 1080p gaming, but I also plan to get a 21:9 ultra widescreen 1440p display (probably a Korean one if they bootleg the LG 1440p display, since the official models from LG are crazy expensive) further down the road to get rid of my crappy Acer monitor. I figured 8gb of vram would help a lot with rendering at 1440p. Or am I just totally wrong?

 

Anyway, would I be better off buying a 780Ti for $450~, getting one of the current 4gb 980s when they're back in stock, or waiting for the fancier 8gb 980s to come out? I'm prepared to drop like $650, so a flagship non-reference card from MSI, Asus, or EVGA sounds appealing. Might as well get a card with top of the line components so it's more reliable and will last longer, right? Not some cheesy reference card with a weak blower cooler on it (even though the reference cooler looks fucking sexy).

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Is this only for gaming?  I would probably just get the GTX 980 - it'll run cooler and quieter, unless you have a really good deal on the GTX 780 ti.

If you are doing rendering with video editing or 3D modeling, I would probably take the GTX 780 ti.  I have heard that in some programs, the 256-bit interface of the GTX 970 and GTX 980 are an extreme bottleneck for professional rendering applications since they can't really take advantage of the new compression algorithm that nvidia has implemented in the new 9XX series.

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Not strictly for gaming, but definitely primarily for it. I plan on using Shadowplay for recording, but honestly I don't think it matters that much since Shadowplay encodes to x264 on the fly. Any editing I have planned is pretty minimal to be honest. I doubt the supposed bottleneck will affect me, and a 980 would certainly beat my 6950.

However, I may eventually get back in to 3D modelling, since I'm actually trying to re-emerge myself in to level design starting with the Source engine since I'm familiar with it already. But I plan to move my way over to UE4 since it's a million times more powerful, and 3D modelling is pretty much essential for any level designer using UE4. But I don't need to do any actual rendering in 3DS Max or Maya or anything like that, so that isn't really a concern.