The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Review: Featuring EVGA
by Ryan Smith on September 26, 2014 10:00 AM ESTSynthetics
As always we’ll also take a quick look at synthetic performance. These tests mainly serve as a canary for finding important architectural and configuration changes.
Tessellation performance has scaled very closely with the change in SMMs and clock speeds, just as we would expect here.
Texel throughput has also taken a hit in accordance with the loss of SMMs and clock speed. Based on gaming performance the GTX 970 doesn’t appear to be too badly handicapped here, but it definitely doesn’t have much in the way of texel throughput to spare.
Pixel throughput on the other hand ends up being extremely odd and not at all what we were expecting. The GTX 970 takes an incredible dive here, with its pixel fillrate dropping by 26%. At a high level this test is bounded by memory bandwidth and ROP throughput, and both of these factors should be identical between GTX 980 and GTX 970. Instead we see GTX 970 lose more performance than should theoretically be possible, as the 26% drop is more than the accumulated difference between the clock speed and SMM differences.
At this point we’re still trying to figure out exactly what’s going on. We have no other evidence that there’s a difference in ROP throughput or memory bandwidth between the GTX 980 and GTX 970 so it is not clear to us where the difference lies. One possibility is that this is somehow bottlenecked at the Raster Engine level – where each of the four engines accounts for 25% of the work – but the pigeonhole principle means that NVIDIA can’t disable a GPC since at least 1 SMM must be active in each GPC partition. This matter will require further research.
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Laststop311 - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
330 for this is a steal. Very few cases one even needs a 980. Even so I am still buying the 980 I keep my hpus for a long time, still using radeon 5870 nowThe-Fox - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
Thanks Ryan ! great article, enjoyed reading it as much as I did the one on the GTX 980.GTX 970 proves to be an excellent card in terms of VFM, its a rare event in the high end GFX card market.
I would love to see GTX 970 in an SLI benchmark and see how it handles UHD (read 4K) games.
With its price point and performance it begs for a dual SLI setup.
Nfarce - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
Guru3D has done it. It's highly impressive.Nfarce - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
I've got two reference cooler EVGA 970s (superclocked) coming from NewEgg on Tuesday. I'm not a big overclocker on GPUs as I'm on air and want all possible heat blown out the back, but can't wait. Coming from a single 680 and having recently moved up to 1440p, and not having to upgrade my Corsair 750W gold PS, it's just an absolute zero brainer.Great review Ryan and thanks for continuing to show older games like Crysis Warhead and Grid 2 (which I use as a reference to compare with Grid Autosport benches)!
Scimitar11 - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
Great article as usual. I just signed up to ask: Will you do any reviews/comparisons of the semi-reference cards with the cheaper blower style coolers for the 970? There are quite a few options out there (at least two non-ACX EVGA cards for example). I would love to know just how much difference there is in temps and noise, and possibly performance between the various cooler types.AndrewJacksonZA - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link
Ryan, are you using the horrendously bad stock AMD coolers for the 290X noise and temperature readings?kwrzesien - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link
Looks like NVIDIA did pretty awesome dealing with the surprise that they had to produce another generation on TSMC 28nm. Frankly these will probably be the best cards made for years to come since they really have 28nm figured out and Maxwell is bringing huge performance/watt. It will be interesting to see if they even make a 960 - would it be a further crippled GM204 or something else, maybe the first 20nm chip?So in classic AnandTech style it would be awesome to get an article on the inside story at NVIDIA about what they have gone through with Apple sucking up the first batch of 20nm at TSMC. I know they made some public noise about it - and think about it from the corporate perspective - they were used to getting first dibs on each die shrink and using that in the top-tier products. Now they are stuck a node behind, they may have to prioritize Tegra and mobile chips on 20nm first and leave desktop parts always a year behind. If that keeps workstation parts behind as well I can see why they would be pissed.
ppi - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link
When can we expect image quality tests?mr.techguru - Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - link
Why you did not mention EVGA has been caught with there chips being not aligned on the heat sink correctly..(Tho, they replied with it being how its suppose to be).Asus is always just a solid company to fall back on..
and gigabyte is generally the same way.
As for the 970's... MSI>Gigabyte>ASUS>EVGA.
EVGA's Problem: http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/evga-geforce-gtx-...
Everything you need to know about the MSI 970: http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/msi_geforce_g...
Gigaplex - Wednesday, October 1, 2014 - link
Neither of those links work