Nvidia announced a new flagship graphics card delivering smoother 4K graphics for PC gamers, plus new G-Sync screen technology for smoother gaming on laptops. Dubbed the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, Nvidia says the GTX 980 Ti will deliver better support for 4K PC gaming, allowing new games such as The Witcher 3 to run at 4K resolution at a reasonable 45 frames per second, compared to 19fps on the older GTX 680. For the latest car racing simulator, Project Cars, Nvidia expects to deliver 47fps on the GTX 980 Ti compared with 18fps on the GTX 680. The reference version of the graphics card will retail for $649 (only US pricing was announced, converting to roughly £425 and AU$825) and the new card comes bundled with the upcoming Batman: Arkham Knight for PC. The introduction of the GTX 980 Ti has also dropped the price of the former flagship model, the GTX 980, down to $499.

The new graphics card is powered by the chip maker's Maxwell microarchitecture, which supports the latest DirectX 12 effects and packs in more video RAM as well. It's a significant jump to 6GB of memory, compared with the previous card's 4GB. The second-generation Maxwell chips allow for high-resolution performance and lighting with better frame rates, but they're also a lot more power efficient -- the GTX 980 has half the power consumption of Nvidia's GTX 750, which was powered by the first-generation Maxwell. For the technically inclined, it's interesting that the GTX 980 Ti is clocked slower than previous cards at 1,000MHz. It makes up for it with a better pixel and texture fill rate, while also packing in more transistors -- 8,000 compared to 5,200 of the GTX 980. When you look at the specs in detail, the GTX 980 Ti is basically a cheaper version of Nvidia's ultimate piece of hardware, the $999 Titan X, having only 6GB of video RAM instead of the Titan X's 12GB.