GTX 980 vs Titan Black

[Venom]

I plan to run 3x SLI with nVidia surround on 3x ROG Swift monitors.
I do a lot of 3D art and rendering like Maya but I also want to have high performance on games.

Should I go
3x SLI GTX 980 Hydro (newer, faster, less cost)
OR
3x SLI Titan Black Hydro (more memory)

[David (PassMark)]

You should check in the Maya forums to see if anyone has done Maya benchmarks on a 3 way system like this. I suspect there won't be much data out there and it would be an expensive purchase to buy just in the hope that Maya can use all this hardware efficiently.

Even finding reasonable gaming benchmarks on 3 ways SLI can be hard.

I just checked the Maya 2015 system requirements for you. The Titan is on the list of recommended cards, but the 980 isn't.