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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Daniel Egger - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
I love this card and am really excited. BUT if this cannot run on a single PCIe connector despite being 145W only that is a real deal breaker as I'm definitely not going to replace my excellent PSU just because some moron decided to plan in some additional headroom...Razorbak86 - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
"single PCIe connector... excellent PSU"Good one. LOL
wetwareinterface - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
if your psu doesn't have 2 6 pin pci-e connectors it can't be that excellent. the lepa 500 watt is $36 and will run the 970 no problem and is a decent supply. i shudder to think what you have if it can't handle this card.Daniel Egger - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
An efficient quiet low power PSU from "be quiet!" for my HTPC which would be perfectly capable of dealing with the GTX 970. There're actually many PSUs which only have 1 PCIe connector because that's the norm not the execption that you'll need at most one. So I take it that all of you "shuddering" all day thinking of what horrible PSUs others might have, have their high end gaming rigs and don't give a crap about silence and/or efficiency -- good for you but maybe schedule a reality check sometime.maximumGPU - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
Yeah, but that "moron" who planned additional headroom is catering to the needs of the biggest market for these cards, who are gamers likely to overclock at some point. Not the niche need of using it in an htpc case with a low power single pcie psu.D. Lister - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link
You could use an adapter to get an extra 6-pin connector, which should work fine considering the low power draw of the 970. That is, if your excellent PSU has an HDD power dongle to spare.</snark>pixelstuff - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Looking at the 970 cards on Newegg, any idea why all brands have the 2x DVI, 1x DisplayPort configuration? While nVidia.com lists the 970 specs as having 3x DisplayPort, 1 DVI port.I was hoping to get a 970 with 3 display ports, so I'm wondering what is going on.
yefi - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
The overclock on this is pretty weak. I get 1314Mhz core with a max boost of 1554Mhz with the MSI Frozr 970. I see reviewers hitting ~1500Mhz also.mr.techguru - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
It seems the ACX Cooler similar to the EVGA 760 ACX has a design/manufacturing flew even the 2.0 version has the pipelines vs GPU position flew ; after throughly reading the reviews & users feedback ( EVGA GeForce GTX 970 ACX has misaligned GPU vs heatpipes) : http://www.overclock.net/t/1514624/eteknix-possibl... and http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/evga-geforce-gtx-... and http://forums.evga.com/m/tm.aspx?m=2221919&p=1 and http://www.eteknix.com/evga-gtx-970-feature-manufa... Therefore I would rather go with another brand Like the Asus Strix Series ; MSI Gaming Series or the Gegabyte G1 Gaming Series .. Less Risk Especially the warranty is RMA. As soon they are available at Stock update asap to order one .. Meanwhile Reason why they did not show the PCB of the ACX 2.0 and they showed us the FTW. I was interested to purchase the ACX version but now In a dilemma since the issue has not been mentioned in a tech site they I usually always trust!bsim500 - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
Good review. Is there going to be a GTX 960 to fill the rather large gap between the GTX 970 and 750Ti?