[Manuel Calavera]

Despite the fewer CUDA cores, TMUs and ROPs, Nvidia is promising GTX Titan X & 980 Ti topping performance. Which isn’t entirely too surprising. For example the GTX 980 had 23% more CUDA cores and a higher clock speed, but it ended up roughly 15% faster. We see this with all full vs cut back GPUs.
This is because not all resources inside the chip are disabled porportionally to the number of CUDA cores that are lasered off. Other on-chip engines are always left untouched. In this case the Raster engines are such an example.What this means is that while we end up with fewer CUDA cores, these CUDA cores have access to proportionally more resources which in turn means we end up with more performance per CUDA core.