The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Review: Featuring EVGA
by Ryan Smith on September 26, 2014 10:00 AM ESTCompany of Heroes 2
Our second benchmark in our benchmark suite is Relic Games’ Company of Heroes 2, the developer’s World War II Eastern Front themed RTS. For Company of Heroes 2 Relic was kind enough to put together a very strenuous built-in benchmark that was captured from one of the most demanding, snow-bound maps in the game, giving us a great look at CoH2’s performance at its worst. Consequently if a card can do well here then it should have no trouble throughout the rest of the game.
Company of Heroes 2 was one of the only games that the GTX 980 didn’t take a significant lead in, and consequently it’s one of the few games that GTX 970 will lose by a significant margin. With the exception of 1080p the stock GTX 970 can’t keep pace with the R9 290, let alone the R9 290XU. Overall NVIDIA’s second-tier card will trail the AMD flagship by 12%, which in the grand scheme of things is still going to be much narrower than the price difference.
In this case Company of Heroes 2 seems especially fond of shader performance. So the GTX 970 drops off by a bit more than in most other games, coming in at just 85% of the performance of GTX 980.
With AMD already doing well on minimum framerates against the GTX 980, against the GTX 970 NVIDIA ends up further behind. When push comes to shove in this game’s hardest scenes, the GTX 970 buckles a bit more than the competition.
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AnnonymousCoward - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
So you're saying it doesn't matter to say "clocked at 7GHz" when the actual clock is 1.75GHz. Well it matters to me! What if the chip multiplies the core clock by 2 internally; should we then say the core clock is 2.2GHz instead of 1.1GHz?Black Obsidian - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link
And thus the reporting of EFFECTIVE clock speeds. Not everyone does (or can) understand the complexities of the underlying architecture.jtrdfw - Wednesday, September 30, 2015 - link
yes. heatsinks on memory are pretty much a scamMagickMan - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
How about a 970 OC vs 290 OC comparison? I don't have a favored GPU, I just care about bang for buck.The_Assimilator - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
What would be the point? 970 already equals or beats 290X, and you don't get much from overclocking Hawaii GPUs, apart from more heat.poohbear - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Thank u for including a full stable of previous gen video cards to compare it to! In particularly the 670 & 770! Gives us a better idea of how it performs!Tetracycloide - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Seconded. Still running a 6950 flashed to 6970 so having the stock 6970 as a point of reference made this the easiest buy ever. Roughly twice the performance with lower power, heat, and noise? Yes.roxamis - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link
I have the same card (Sapphire 6950 Dirt 3, unlocked to 6970) and one fan of the 2 died last week (hitting 90-100 deg C in games). So with that I went to see what i can replace it with and the 970 ticks all my marks.krazyfrog - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
The price-to-performance ratio is strong with this one.Frenetic Pony - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Certainly, but considering AMD has implemented some of the same things I'd expect an equivalent price to performance ratio from AMD for their new cards. Cut down the 290's bus to 256bit, clock the ram to 7ghz, and with the bandwidth compression you'd get a cheaper card with the same performance.Still, nice all around to have choices, been looking at cards myself, and am going to build a system for my brother quite soon. Yay price wars!