Out of the gate GTX 980 takes off like a rocket. AMD’s cards could easily best even GTX 780 Ti here, but GTX 980 wipes out AMD’s lead and then some. At 1.6M samples/sec, GTX 980 Ti is 15% faster than R9 290X and 54% faster than GTX 780 Ti. This, as it’s important to remind everyone, is for a part that technically only has 71% of the CUDA cores of GTX 780 Ti. So per CUDA core, GTX 980 delivers over 2x the LuxMark performance of GTX 780 Ti. Meanwhile against GTX 680 and GTX 780 the lead is downright silly. GTX 980 comes close to tripling its GK104 based predecessors.