The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Review: Featuring EVGA
by Ryan Smith on September 26, 2014 10:00 AM ESTCrysis 3
Still one of our most punishing benchmarks, Crysis 3 needs no introduction. With Crysis 3, Crytek has gone back to trying to kill computers and still holds “most punishing shooter” title in our benchmark suite. Only in a handful of setups can we even run Crysis 3 at its highest (Very High) settings, and that’s still without AA. Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to drive games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2014.
Crysis 3 is another game where the outcome between the R9 290XU and GTX 970 depends on the resolution. At 4K Low the GTX 970 trails the R9 290XU by 10%, only for the two to get within a frame of each other at 1440p High. Past that it’s all NVIDIA at 1080p. This once again neatly illustrates that AMD still holds a general resolution scaling advantage over NVIDIA and the Maxwell 2 architecture. Though since we’re looking at a $329 card that’s cheaper than any 4K monitor, that’s not an advantage that’s going to be of much value in the real world.
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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!