Final Thoughts
Just going off of the specifications we can assume that the two GTX 980s would outperform the Titan X. I mean you are getting 4096 CUDA cores over the 3072 CUDA cores in the Titan X. But things like the 12 gigs of vRAM and the larger memory bus make things harder to figure out. On top of that we have to keep in mind that when running SLI you don’t see double the performance. So at the end of the day how do the cards fall? Well in a synthetic environment the two GTX 980s in SLI stomp on the Titan X. In game for the most part the result is the same but in games with poor SLI performance you might see the same or less performance with the two cards. In addition to that from my experience when running any multiple card configuration (from AMD or Nvidia) you can expect to run into weird issues from time to time and when new games launch there is a greater chance of slowdowns and bugs. I will say that Nvidia has done a great job recently with their “Game Ready Drivers”. For most big game launches they have had a new driver ready at or before the day of the game launch. For example they launched their 352.86 driver on the 18th of May for The Witcher 3, the day before its launch. This included SLI drivers and GeForce Experience 1 click optimizations.
So what would I go with considering they are the same price? Well if you are building a monster LAN rig the Titan X is really the only option because you can only run a single card on a Mini-ITX board. In addition to that the lower power usage would be beneficial and I would prefer the stability when at an event. I don’t want to have an issue in a tournament. For my personal rig I would go the other way, the GTX 980s unless of course I could afford Titan X’s in SLI ;).