Originally Posted by
neurotix
To provide more information:
Overclocking is raising the frequency of a GPU to achieve more performance.
Unlocking is usually flashing the BIOS of a card with the BIOS of a better card (e.g. Titan X) in order to unlock more shaders (CUDA cores).
When GPUs are made, sometimes the extra shaders are simply disabled in BIOS and the card is sold as a lesser card, for example the AMD 6970 had shaders disabled and it was sold as a 6950. This means the card had the same amount of physical shaders but they were locked off through software (BIOS). However, sometimes when they do this, instead of locking off the shaders through the BIOS they physically destroy them by cutting them with a laser. This is called a hardware lock. In the case of a hardware lock, nothing you can do will reenable the extra shaders.
Some recent cards to be unlockable are the AMD Radeon 6950 (to a 6970) and the
AMD R9 290 (to a 290X). In both cases, certain cards (but not all) were unlockable by flashing the BIOS of the higher end card. (putting a 290X BIOS on a 290 if that was unclear.) It was basically totally random which cards were unlockable and they developed a tool/method for testing whether or not a card would unlock. There WERE some patterns observed though, early on, with the R9 290: reference Powercolor brand 290s had a good chance of unlocking.
Unfortunately, I cannot think of an Nvidia card in recent memory that has been unlockable through software (BIOS). If anyone can provide an example from the last 5 years, please speak up.
Rest assured, however: the 980ti is a fantastic card and pretty much 97% of a Titan X. Those extra shaders only add around 3-5% performance. As others have mentioned, through overclocking you can make up this small difference (in comparison to a stock Titan X without boost) by overclocking the card. So if your 980ti is at 1300mhz+ you pretty much have Titan X performance anyway (minus the larger frame buffer I believe).