The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Review: Featuring EVGA
by Ryan Smith on September 26, 2014 10:00 AM ESTTotal War: Rome 2
The second strategy game in our benchmark suite, Total War: Rome 2 is the latest game in the Total War franchise. Total War games have traditionally been a mix of CPU and GPU bottlenecks, so it takes a good system on both ends of the equation to do well here. In this case the game comes with a built-in benchmark that plays out over a forested area with a large number of units, definitely stressing the GPU in particular.
For this game in particular we’ve also gone and turned down the shadows to medium. Rome’s shadows are extremely CPU intensive (as opposed to GPU intensive), so this keeps us from CPU bottlenecking nearly as easily.
Yet again we have a situation where the winner and loser is effectively decided by the resolution in use. GTX 970 will trail at 4K, only to take a slight lead at 1440p. As we’ve stated before 1440p and 1080p are going to be the sweet spots for GTX 970 based on its $329 price tag, so for GTX 970 this means it’s winning or tying in the resolutions where it matters the most.
Of course if you factor in the FTW overclock then the point becomes moot. With the GTX 970 and R9 290XU tracking so close together, the higher clock speeds mean that a GTX 970 card can push ahead of R9 290XU on average.
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thesid - Monday, November 10, 2014 - link
I have a rig with i2600K and 16gigs of 12800ddr3 ram and a gtx 570, if i upgrade to the 970 gtx will it be bottlenecked by the rest of the components?atl - Friday, January 30, 2015 - link
Under power consumption, i would like to have comparison of GPU only consumption also, not whole system.SeanJ76 - Monday, February 9, 2015 - link
Yeah that 970GTX FTW is a damn good card. I was shocked at how close the performance gap was of the 970 FTW and the 980(although this has always been the case with the FTW versions).sheriff12 - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
I'm MAD! When I first looked at the Gigabyte GTX 970 on amazon.com a month ago, it was $308, now it's $348. Just because sales are good, does that mean they should gouge the consumer for all they can?thelategamer - Friday, May 5, 2017 - link
Here's my honest review of the GTX 970 and upgrading to SLI 970s rather than getting underperforming 1070s and 1080s - http://www.thelategamer.com/video-game-review/late...