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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
155 Comments
View All Comments
MrSpadge - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
What you describe is what Tonga should have been. Didn't turn out so well :/Sure, the 285 is priced below GM204 cards, but the chip is almost as large and hence costs AMD the same to produce it. They SHOULD play in the same league.
thepaleobiker - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
"Crysis 3 Summary" - The GTX 670 trails the R9 290XU by 10%....It should be the GTX 970 :)
Also, on the page with Company of Heroes - The Charts do not display correctly, or more specifically, their headers (the thick Blue bar/heading with info about resolution etc?) are cropped out on all the images except the first one.
Regards,
Vishnu
krazyfrog - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Also, last page, fifth paragraph"AMD would have to cut R9 290X’s performance by nearly $200 to be performance competitive, and even then they can’t come close to matching NVIDIA’s big edge in power consumption."
Should be '290X's price', I believe.
CZroe - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
I have the reference style 4GB EVGA GTX 760 with the short PCB but it was discontinued shortly after launch. I got some 670/760 water blocks for SLI from Swiftech and found that only Zotac was making a short PCB 4GB GTX 760 card like my EVGA even though it has fewer memory chips (probably worse for over locking). Because the vast majority of GTX 760 cards had reference 680 PCBs, it is very difficult to tell which "reference" 760 this article is talking about. The rare short PCB or the longer one?Ryan Smith - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
The short PCB and the stretched PCB were virtually identical, so to answer the question I'm technically comparing it to the short PCB, but either comparison is valid. The stretched section only contains a handful of additional discrete components; it's mostly to allow fitting an open air cooler.Atari2600 - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
The Radeon 290x is nearly a year old now. It would be surprising if an Nvidia GPU that sacrifices DP capability wouldn't be significantly quicker per mm^2 at this point.The improvement in performance/watt is notable and nvidia deserve much credit for their work in this area.
Phasenoise - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Oh my the name of that card. "EVGA GeForce GTX 970 FTW ACX 2.0"Reads like my niece's texting log. omg lol gtx ftw, btb.
jjj - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
"considering the fact that GTX 970 is a $329 card I don’t seriously expect it to be used for 4K gaming"You should and Nvidia should market it as lowering the entry price for 4k. It's kinda the least you need for 4k, can do 4k just not max setting everywhere for just 329$. Pair it with some bellow 500$ screen deal and 4k gaming is a lot more accessible than 2 weeks ago.
We've looked at what's the bare minimum for 1080p for years and we are used to it, now it's 4k's turn to become more mainstream and we need to get used to looking at it the same way.
in the US and even more so in China 4k screens are not that prohibitive anymore. 400-500$ for a screen, 330$ for a 970, an overclocked dual core and you can do budget 4k gaming at 1.2k$.
4k should be one of the reasons some people that buy 200$ cards might go for the 970 this time around.
And with 20nm 4k should become a lot more affordable so it's time to not think of it as a small niche.
garadante - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Can we get power usage with non reference 290/290X's? If I recall correctly, power usage drops something like 15-25 watts when it's running at closer to 70 C than 95 C as reference cooling profiles make it run.justaviking - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Zero Fan Speed Idling...Will the zero fan speed capability be something that will be delivered via a driver update? I hope so. Or will it require a "Rev B" of the hardware too?
I don't need silence, but quiet is nice. I assumed the 970 would be quite a bit quieter than the 980 due to lower TDP. The test results surprise me (not in a good way).
This makes me even more impressed with the 980. But it still costs $200 more. Tough choice.