Official Nvidia GTX 970 Discussion Thread

[Lewellyn]

I feel sorry for this thread already

 

All in one place, out of the way, not in anyone's face. Good plan, master plan, a final solution if you would.

[Laputacake]

All in one place, out of the way, not in anyone's face. Good plan, master plan, a final solution if you would.

Stop all the threads with that bloody video. (hopefully)

[Lewellyn]

Stop all the threads with that bloody video. (hopefully)

 

What video? I didn't see any video. Those are only rumors, that video doesn't exist and neither do any issues.

 

They're watching us

[maizenblue]

At the last second I decided to trade my newly bought reference 970 in for a EVGA SC ACX 2.0 980.

 

I was annoyed at Nvidia initially playing stupid about it and the fanboys zeal in attacking anyone who questioned them, but I was satisfied with Nvidias eventual response. They really were stuck between a rock and a hard place. I figured Id just stick with the 970 since I got a 1080p monitor. Then I started thinking the main reason I got the blower style reference cooler was so it would vent the heat out of the case in SLI, but the VRAM gimped 970 seemed less attractive for SLI since this story broke, so I returned it for the 980 while I still could.

 

Now I got a card that by itself can do a decent job of handling 1440p should I go upgrade my monitor, and has the full 4gb, a better cooler, and nearly the highest factory overclock for a 980 out there(a decent amount more than the gigabyte g1), with room for more. The card wont be as pretty as the reference was, especially with no backplate, but I can live with the looks. I had to pay over 150 for the upgrade but I dont plan on upgrading for a long time. I got a corsair 450D so venting the heat outside of the case isn't so important as the airflow is about as good as it gets.

 

If I had to do it over again I would have just got an MSI lightning 290x, which at 1440p damn near matches the 980 in a few games even without being overclocked, for almost 300 dollars less. and would have looked awesome with my sabertooth 2 mobo and gold xpg v2 ram.

[roberrrtz]

tl dr

The issue is not the performance, the issue is not getting what you paid for.

Sure it has 4gb, but the partitioning should be specified and the ROPS where wrong, so there.

[roberrrtz]

I didnt realize people were playing @ resolution higher than 4K. That must be a great experience...............

multidisplay setup, duh...

[Misanthrope]

This made me lol:

http://bursor.com/investigations/nvidia/

[79wjd]

tl dr

The issue is not the performance, the issue is not getting what you paid for.

Sure it has 4gb, but the partitioning should be specified and the ROPS where wrong, so there.

Like the ROP count actually matters... With the cut back SMMs (which we knew about), the card isn't able to access more than 56 ROPs anyway. So if specs are really so important, then people should've been looking at the SMMs and realizing that the card couldn't utilize 64 ROPs regardless, making it an irrelevant spec. 

[roberrrtz]

Like the ROP count actually matters... With the cut back SMMs (which we knew about), the card isn't able to access more than 56 ROPs anyway. So if specs are really so important, then people should've been looking at the SMMs and realizing that the card couldn't utilize 64 ROPs regardless, making it an irrelevant spec.

yeah, but as i said, its not the performance that is the issue.

[Morfy]

I just had to post this here guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spZJrsssPA0

[79wjd]

I just had to post this here guys: 

Because that hasn't already been posted a few hundred times. 

[Morfy]

Sorry, didn't have time to go through all 62 pages, my bad.

[Dabombinable]

My testing of the Gigabyte GTX 970 G1 Gaming, with abnormal boost speeds (EVGA precision and MSI afterburner were rest to defaults, then closed completely, and it still boosted way over 1400MHz). This was done on an 1080p monitor, with; 2K, 3K and 4K DSR used. Minecraft had optifine and Shaders installed, view distance on far and all graphical options maxed out.

Note that this first image is Minecraft running on my GTX 650@1080p:

GTX 970-1080p, playable at above 45FPS:

GTX 970-2K, playable at 30FPS (25FPS dips):

GTX 970-3K, barely playable at 20-25FPS:

GTX 970-4K, unplayable, 20FPS spikes with 12-18FPS being normal, unable to properly interact with anything at all until Minecraft was closed down-couldn't stand how jerky everything was:

 

In conclusion with these tests at 1080p, 2K, 3K and 4K, it is easy to experience for yourself the impact that the memory limits of the GTX 970 have on games and the system overall, as to even take the 4K screenshot I had to close Minecraft due to how bad the entire system was lagging (Its not RAM, I've got 16GB installed and Minecraft doesn't even use the 1GB allocated to it). Feel free to disagree with me, but only after you have done the same tests yourself and shown evidence that proves me wrong.

Edit: sorry about the image quality, I had to switch to jpegs to ensure that the files weren't too big to upload.

[Angry]

Minecraft looks like a horrible benchmark.... mind showing CPU usage at 4k?

[Not_Sean]

Just got my MSI GTX 970 ! ! Now I can finally join in the discussion 

[Razzaa]

multidisplay setup, duh...

With the 970? Bahahaha

[ddswh1pk0s]

What I can't understand is why would someone that can afford a 4K display not be able to afford a 980???

 

Another thing, we all knew the benchmarks in games before we found out, no one was complaining about FPS drops. How come everyone is jumping up and complaining about it now?

 

And another thing, people who have "gtx 970 3.5GB" in their signature are actually incorrect because the card has 4GB of VRAM, the efficiency of the last 0.5GB is irrelevant, it's still a 4GB card.

[roberrrtz]

With the 970? Bahahaha

some people do, and some people do it with sli but are still bound to 4gb(3.5gb) of ram so they get the issue

[Dabombinable]

Minecraft looks like a horrible benchmark.... mind showing CPU usage at 4k?

I had task manager minimized in the task bar, look next to the volume icon, and you will see that in all resolutions, CPU usage was pretty much the same. And its an i5 4440, there is no way it isn't powerful enough to run a game like Minecraft at any resolution. And remember that as the resolution increases, you become more GPU bound.

[mr moose]

What I can't understand is why would someone that can afford a 4K display not be able to afford a 980???

 

Another thing, we all knew the benchmarks in games before we found out, no one was complaining about FPS drops. How come everyone is jumping up and complaining about it now?

 

And another thing, people who have "gtx 970 3.5GB" in their signature are actually incorrect because the card has 4GB of VRAM, the efficiency of the last 0.5GB is irrelevant, it's still a 4GB card.

 

This is something I have been pondering also,  why would anyone who has bought or is intending to buy a decent 4K monitor be  settling for a 970, even before the news broke it's a no brainer that the 980, 290x, 295x, etc would have been better options.

 

It's kinda like trying to setup a small corporate network with a couple of $20 base 10 hubs, then wondering why it isn't fast. 

[Dabombinable]

This is something I have been pondering also,  why would anyone who has bought or is intending to buy a decent 4K monitor be  settling for a 970, even before the news broke it's a no brainer that the 980, 290x, 295x, etc would have been better options.

 

It's kinda like trying to setup a small corporate network with a couple of $20 base 10 hubs, then wondering why it isn't fast. 

I tried to tell people during the vRAM debacle that a GTX 970 was never designed for 4K gaming. But did they listen? No.

[Guest]

This is something I have been pondering also,  why would anyone who has bought or is intending to buy a decent 4K monitor be  settling for a 970, even before the news broke it's a no brainer that the 980, 290x, 295x, etc would have been better options.

 

It's kinda like trying to setup a small corporate network with a couple of $20 base 10 hubs, then wondering why it isn't fast. 

 

I tried to tell people during the vRAM debacle that a GTX 970 was never designed for 4K gaming. But did they listen? No.

 

Then what about SLI owners? Running modern games at 4k on a single 970 is unreasonable (the whole "you could afford a 980" argument is still pretty disgusting though) but what about the people who bought 2 of them? Suddenly 1/8th of your VRAM is a huge deal. Not to mention that this severely limits your upgrade capabilities in the future. Bought a single 970 for 1080p or 1440p gaming? Want to buy a second one later down the line? Well that's suddenly a gimped setup one way or the other.

 

In regards to "why didn't people notice this sooner", they did. A few weeks after launch the first reports came along that a 970 performs worse than expected in higher resolution gaming. Lowered "average" bandwidth suddenly makes sense. Not to mention that people have been investigating this for a while until they finally came to the conclusion that it is actually VRAM related.

 

Lastly, it might not seem like a huge deal now but you have to take into account that this will affect future games with higher VRAM requirements or some of the "bad" console ports. It is entirely possible that we'll see games in the near future that eat up VRAM (mods for certain games already do), so it is far from unreasonable for 970 owners to be fucking pissed.

[Dabombinable]

Then what about SLI owners? Running modern games at 4k on a single 970 is unreasonable (the whole "you could afford a 980" argument is still pretty disgusting though) but what about the people who bought 2 of them? Suddenly 1/8th of your VRAM is a huge deal. Not to mention that this severely limits your upgrade capabilities in the future. Bought a single 970 for 1080p or 1440p gaming? Want to buy a second one later down the line? Well that's suddenly a gimped setup one way or the other.

 

In regards to "why didn't people notice this sooner", they did. A few weeks after launch the first reports came along that a 970 performs worse than expected in higher resolution gaming. Lowered "average" bandwidth suddenly makes sense. Not to mention that people have been investigating this for a while until they finally came to the conclusion that it is actually VRAM related.

 

Lastly, it might not seem like a huge deal now but you have to take into account that this will affect future games with higher VRAM requirements or some of the "bad" console ports. It is entirely possible that we'll see games in the near future that eat up VRAM (mods for certain games already do), so it is far from unreasonable for 970 owners to be fucking pissed.

No matter what is said, if you intend to run multiple GPUs at 4K, an R9 290X will always be a better option then a GTX 970, regardless of the power draw.

[Guest]

No matter what is said, if you intend to run multiple GPUs at 4K, an R9 290X will always be a better option then a GTX 970, regardless of the power draw.

 

I know that, I wouldn't even argue otherwise, but that doesn't mean that it's somehow the fault of 970 owners that their cards won't run certain games at this resolution very well. Those people have all the right to be mad right now and they were being mislead, that's all I'm saying.

[othertomperson]

This is something I have been pondering also,  why would anyone who has bought or is intending to buy a decent 4K monitor be  settling for a 970, even before the news broke it's a no brainer that the 980, 290x, 295x, etc would have been better options.

 

Because to drive a 4K display you need two of them. Whatever you go for, from Nvidia or AMD, you need two of them. And according to the benchmarks the FPS difference between any of these GPUs was surprisingly minimal. Most of the remarks about the 970 were along the lines of "hoshit this thing is... basically no different to a 980, yet costs nearly £200 less". Then bear in mind that you're buying two of them, so this price difference is compounded. For context, the 980 cost the same as a 4K monitor, each for what is still very little return in terms of performance. And these benchmarks don't suddenly not be true just because you find out something new about the card. It's still an extremely well-performing GPU, and the 290X's price had to be slashed dramatically, in a very short amount of time to remain relevant.

 

So that's why not the 980. Why not AMD then? The answer's simple: price. Given that between all of these solutions there's only a few fps difference, price becomes important. And while two 970s cost me £500, an R9 295X2 was still £1200 at the time. Two R9 290Xs were £800.

 

There's also the issue that two open air coolers sandwiched together in SLI/CF aren't going to be ideally placed thermally. With a 970 this isn't an issue, it runs pretty cool. The 290X, though, is another story. Do you use a reference blower design so that their temperatures don't affect eachother, but they throttle? Or do you use two open air coolers, allow the bottom card to massively heat the upper card, have louder and more obnoxious fans, AND the possibility of it throttling? At any sign of throttling any potential fps advantage over the 970 is pretty much gone.

 

So tl;dr it was the only solution that made sense, and it still makes sense. It's a solution that consistently gets between 50 and 80 fps in most games that I play. I still recommend that people just buy whichever is cheaper where they are and try to wade through the fanboyism and misinformation going around.