Maximum PC's benchmarking actually saw the GTX 980 surpass its advertised boost clock of 1216 MHz, up to 1253 MHz, while topping out at a temperature of 80 degrees Celsius (84 degrees in SLI). A single GTX 980 outperformed the 780 Ti in almost all cases, and beat AMD's R9 290X in most tests (Hitman: Absolution is a notable exception where AMD's cards put up higher numbers). Also, in multiple games, our two GTX 980s running in SLI delivered 10-20 frames per second better performance than AMD's dual-GPU R9 295X.
GTX 980 benchmarks: 2560x1440, 4xMSAA, max settings
Benchmarks courtesy of Maximum PC. Check out their full article, with more testing results, here.
GTX 980 benchmarks: 3840x2160, 4xMSAA, max settings
Benchmarks courtesy of Maximum PC. Check out their full article, with more testing results, here.
( Update: Our friends at Maximum PC redid their benchmark tests for Hitman and Batman in 4K, and the AMD cards weren't doing nearly as well as they originally thought, though they're still the best option for Hitman.)
Keep in mind that these are scores from Nvidia's reference 980. Cards from EVGA, Asus, Gigabyte and so on will likely be clocked higher, and there's definitely room for overclocking above that base clock.
Nvidia's in-house benchmarks also show the GTX 970 outperforming the R9 290X in most cases--we'll have more data and impressions on a Gigabyte 970 over the weekend.
