The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Review: Featuring EVGA
by Ryan Smith on September 26, 2014 10:00 AM ESTCrysis: Warhead
Up next is our legacy title for 2014, Crysis: Warhead. The stand-alone expansion to 2007’s Crysis, at over 5 years old Crysis: Warhead can still beat most systems down. Crysis was intended to be future-looking as far as performance and visual quality goes, and it has clearly achieved that. We’ve only finally reached the point where single-GPU cards have come out that can hit 60fps at 1920 with 4xAA, never mind 2560 and beyond.
With the GTX 980 already falling just short of beating the R9 290XU in Crysis: Warhead, this is the only other instance where the GTX 970 isn’t a completely competitive card. Even the EVGA FTW overclock can’t help it catch up to the R9 290, let alone the R9 290XU. Crysis simply calls for more shader power than what the GTX 970 can realistically deliver.
The story is much the same with minimum framerates. Although GTX 970 doesn’t fare any worse relatively speaking, it also doesn’t get to close the gap.
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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.