I bought the GTX 970 last month after most review sites described it as the deal of the decade and a product that stole the 980s thunder. Two GTX 970s SLI’d together were beating the 980, a single GTX 970 was beating a Titan in 3DMark firestrike, and everything was golden.
So I bought it. Then I started to notice the tech community reporting about a few bugs with the card. There were a lot of rumours, trolling, misinformation, and general panic on the Internet, up until the point that. Being an owner of the much hyped and much slandered card, I thought that I should see for myself share my take on it.
Let’s Get into This
I would be wrong on my part not to mention something about NVIDIA GameWorks. It is a bundle that has been around for a while, but the ease of use that if brings to the player is so easily taken for granted. It preps you up in no time and allows you to get right to the gaming. Stuff like Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR) and Multi-Frame Sampled Anti-Aliasing (MFAA) for stunning graphics really make it a treat for you to play your game
Heads up, guys, I’m going to assume one thing first, that you’re gaming at 1080p. Why? Because, well, you’d be better off buying a 980 for this much money.
So I tested my rig, which you can find here, validated.
I tested it with Far Cry 4,and you can find the footage here (All footage captured with NvidiaShadowplay)
There, I maxed it out and played it at fluid framerates with no stuttering at all. See for yourselves.
The truth is, games do not utilize more than 3 or so GBs at 1080p even with maximum Antialiasing (Top VRAM hog, if a game ever stutters, turn AA down) and Ultra textures and lighting. The card that stresses the memory most on my card is Skyrim, because I use 2K, 4K, and (for rocks) 8K textures, and had like 200 mods running on top of the base game. And even that didn’t pose much of a challenge for the card.
The only game that does suffer massively however, is Shadow of Mordor with the ultra texture pack (base game on very high runs fine), which recommends 6GBs of VRAM. That’s GTX Titan territory.
My Verdict
So there it is, no matter how you cut it, the 970 really is one heck of a deal at 1080p or even 1440p, and is simply the most value for money GPU in quite a while. Gaming on 1080p is as smooth as silk on this thing. There were a few that felt the card had not delivered but NVIDIA did address it through Jen-Hsun’s Open Letter On GeForce GTX 970 which I felt was a good initiative on their part.
I’d love to hear from other GTX 970 users out there, and if you happen to be one yourself, please let me know what you think in the comments below. Cheers!
