The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Review: Featuring EVGA
by Ryan Smith on September 26, 2014 10:00 AM ESTGRID 2
The final game in our benchmark suite is also our racing entry, Codemasters’ GRID 2. Codemasters continues to set the bar for graphical fidelity in racing games, and with GRID 2 they’ve gone back to racing on the pavement, bringing to life cities and highways alike. Based on their in-house EGO engine, GRID 2 includes a DirectCompute based advanced lighting system in its highest quality settings, which incurs a significant performance penalty but does a good job of emulating more realistic lighting within the game world.
Our final game once again sees the GTX 970 start out trailing the R9 290XU, only to start pulling ahead once the resolution drops. At 1440p it’s practically a tie, and at 1080p it becomes a clear victory for the GTX 970.
Meanwhile it’s interesting to note that at an average performance gap of 10%, this is the game with the smallest performance difference between the GTX 980 and GTX 970. Compared to ROP throughput and memory bandwidth, shader and texture throughput isn’t being tested here by as much, which helps to negate some of the GTX 970’s innate disadvantage.
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Kalessian - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Is it really safe to overclock the memory like that when there aren't any heatsinks on them?Also, 1st?
Ryan Smith - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
As long as you're not giving them additional voltage (which you can't do on this card): yes. GDDR5 does not consume all that much power, even if it is relatively more than DDR3. The airflow off of the fans is plenty for stock voltage.Viewgamer - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Why no Mantle benchmarks for Thief ?winterspan - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
I'm assuming because this is an Nvidia review...eanazag - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
No mantle is likely because it didn't give a great showing last time in the AMD mantle review. If I remember correctly, Thief maybe even had a performance regression with Mantle being used.Ammaross - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
Because Mantle only has benefit in CPU-capped performance. When you run benchmarks on an i7 or better, Mantle has no tangible benefit and sometimes has regressions.Viewgamer - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Or even Mantle benchmarks for BF4 for that matter ?Ryan Smith - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Apologies. The Mantle results have to be added manually since our graphing system can't handle multiple results for the same card automatically. I had actually entered in the data but neglected to regenerate the graphs.SeanJ76 - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
Sounds like your not using EVGA PrecisonX 4.2.1, you can add as much voltage as you like to the 970 GTX FTW.........idiot.....P39Airacobra - Sunday, November 29, 2015 - link
Ok first of all EVGA Precision or the type of software has nothing to do with that, Also he has a valid concern about the V-Ram temps and the VRM. Also don't call people idiots! That's my Job! IDIOT!