If you are holding off, wait for pascal honestly. It should be more powerful for a lower range card. If you are going to go for it, I still suggest the FTW since it is $50 cheaper.

Hy all !
 
Two 980 ti without blackplate crashed in one month. Awesome ! I m waiting for a third card (EVGA RMA) by next week. Sorry for my english, I'm only french ;-)
 
Bye

Scarlet-Tech
If you are holding off, wait for pascal honestly. It should be more powerful for a lower range card. If you are going to go for it, I still suggest the FTW since it is $50 cheaper.

So the upcoming 1080, or whatever the initial, presumably end of May release will be branded is considered a lower range card?  I was highly considering just getting a 980ti for the short term, due to wanting play Dark Souls 3 with a lot more eye candy for a first playthrough than what I'd get with a GTX .  It's not like the 980ti would be a "waste" of money if I ended up being stuck with it, but I find it odd that it would be considered a higher range card, and not elligible for a Step-Up swap.

Keep I mind, when Nvidia launched the 980, they launched them at Nvidia.com almost 2 weeks prior to retailers being allowed to sell them. The May release is possibly a soft release, not a market release.

If you get the 1080, it will be equal to the 980ti at best, but it will draw much less power, which is the winning point of the newer cards.

Hmm.  I do realize that the "2x performance per watt" is most likely simply meaning "the same performance with half of the draw", but I doubt I'm alone in hoping that Pascal was actually going to be a large step up in performance too.  Either way, it sounds like getting a 980ti would most likely give me the boost I am looking for.  It just wouldn't be as cost efficient in the long run.  This is quite the conundrum.  At worst, say the initial public offerings for Pascal are released in July, that's ~3 months after the release of a game I wanted to be able to boost upon my first playthrough.  Rationally, it's not particularly smart to spend this kind of money for a single game, when I could get a better deal not too far into the future, but you can't ever have another first experience with the same game, and I'm definitely not going to wait to play it either.  I do actually have a few other games that my GTX 780 chugs with in specific areas, but I had no problem waiting until up to even September to replay them, so I'm not really factoring those in.
 
Honestly, I might just wait until closer to the release of Dark Souls 3 and just pray that someone has a few benchmarks @ 1080p with AA/HBAO (if supported).  Right now I can play The Witcher 3  with Hairworks off with it dropping as low as 46fps, but it usually stays right at, or near 60fps with everything on high or ultra.  Getting the upgrade bug this close to the release of a new series sucks!

I just bought a GTX 980ti but Im coming from Dual Gtx 480s so the gain will be worth it for me to say the least. 

I went ahead and purchased an FTW a few hours ago.  I'd be gaining around a 50% increase over what I currently own, and considering it will probably be Christmas at the earliest before the large die cards start appearing, whatever.  I'll get the performance I was wanting now anyway.  If the 1080s are actually released within time to use Step-Up, and whatever stock form EVGA ships them in regarding noise levels are comparable (with them obviously having at least equal performance) I'll use it.  Otherwise, not a big deal. It's not like I'll be needing more than that for a long time anyway, since I do most of my primary gaming on a plasma TV.  Then in the event that something is realeased that actually taxes this card, I'll just get a 1080 Ti in a year or two.
 
My older system that I retired to basically a media/storage along with emulation PC is still using a GTX 580 from the beginning of 2010.  Swapping it with my current GTX 780 will be a decent upgrade for that system as well.  Plus, it already died a few months ago, and was temporarily resuscitated by throwing it in the oven.  No idea how long it actually has left.

That sounds like a sound plan. You could easily sell your current card unlike myself. 

well i got my 980ti today and looking around i think the division promotion only applies to cards bought from evga or selected geforce retailers [kogan isnt one of them] and tomb raider expired so am i correct in saying theres nothing to redeem in this case right? 

jabr0ni
well i got my 980ti today and looking around i think the division promotion only applies to cards bought from evga or selected geforce retailers [kogan isnt one of them] and tomb raider expired so am i correct in saying theres nothing to redeem in this case right? 

Did you at least get a backplate on yours ? I spent $650.00 on one thru evga & no plate . They should make it retroactive like they did with the 470/480 hi-flow brackets . Just my 2 cents ...