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Nvidia announces 900 series graphics cards

The GTX 980 and GTX 970 revealed.

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Nvidia has just lifted the lid on their latest high-end graphics cards, with the the GTX 980 and GTX 970 being the first two cards released as part of the new 900 series.

The GTX 980 is being priced from £429, while the 970 comes with a gentler starting price of £259. Both cards are based on the company's new Maxwell chip architecture.

Details on the new features supported by the 900 series were included in the press release, and rather than trying to condense that information, we've included it below in its entirety:

Nvidia announces 900 series graphics cards

VXGI - Voxel Global Illumination: Realistic lighting is among the most challenging problems faced in real-time graphics. Simulating both direct and indirect lighting, such as reflections for dynamic scenes, has to date been too computationally demanding for GPUs beyond those available to professionals. Game developers have been forced to use lighting tricks that compromise scene realism.
 
Maxwell overcomes these limitations, combining the performance and programmability required to model both direct and indirect light sources. It does so by deploying VXGI, a new NVIDIA technique to accurately depict indirect lighting, including diffuse lighting, specular lighting and reflections.
 
VXGI is being added to NVIDIA GameWorks, the world's most advanced game graphics library, so developers can build future games with dynamic environments filled with rich, natural lighting and breathtaking realism. It is being integrated into popular games engines like Unreal Engine 4, and will be available to developers later this year.
  
MFAA - Multi-Frame Sampled Anti-Aliasing: NVIDIA engineers have given the GTX 980 and 970 a further performance boost with a new technique called multi-frame sampled anti-aliasing, which leverages new capabilities in Maxwell GPUs.
 
MFAA varies the anti-aliasing sample patterns across pixels both within an individual frame and between multiple frames. It then uses a newly developed synthesis filter to produce the best image quality and does so faster than conventional anti-aliasing. For gamers, MFAA yields image quality approaching that of 4xMSAA at the cost of 2xMSAA-enabling titles to run faster while maintaining high levels of image quality.
 
DSR - Dynamic Super Resolution: The GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 GPUs can deliver a higher fidelity gaming experience even for those playing on standard 1080p displays. With Maxwell's Dynamic Super Resolution technology, games can be rendered at 4K or other high-end resolutions and then scaled down to the native resolution on the user's display using a 13-tap Gaussian filter. The resulting image is much higher quality than simply rendering directly to 1080p.
 
DSR is automatically enabled through GeForce Experience, an NVIDIA application that automatically optimizes game settings for peak performance, downloads the latest drivers, and enables game streaming and in-game action capture. Gamers can turn on DSR and enjoy high-fidelity gaming with a single click of a button-without having to upgrade their monitor.
 
VR Direct: To deliver on the immersive potential of virtual reality, games require high frame rates and low latency. VR Direct technology incorporates a number of new features to increase performance, lower latency and increase compatibility for VR headsets. These features include:
 
· VR SLI-provides heightened performance on virtual reality devices where multiple GPUs can be assigned a specific eye to render the stereo images faster.
· Asynchronous Warp-cuts latency in half and quickly adjusts images as gamers move their heads, without the need to re-render new frames.
· Auto Stereo-improves game compatibility for VR devices, such as Oculus Rift, and allows users to play games on select headsets that weren't originally designed for VR.



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