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
Ryan Smith - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
It will apparently be delivered via a vBIOS update, judging from what is being said on EVGA's forum.justaviking - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
Excellent. Thank you.Gunbuster - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Too bad it seems ACX 2.0 is a loud ass cooler, have used EVGA in the past but that moves it off my list.Qwertilot - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
You'd think they should be able to get the fans to at the very least spin down a lot further than that at idle - there seems to be at least three 970 cards capable of running on purely passive cooling at idle now. (Asus, MSI and Palit.).maximumGPU - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Very tempting for us 670 owners!Although will look for models with quieter coolers. Seems silly to have a loud one with such a low TDP.
Dahak - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Did I miss the information about the compatibility issues that was indicated in the 980 review? or is it going to be in another article?JarredWalton - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
It was briefly discussed on page 3:http://www.anandtech.com/show/8568/the-geforce-gtx...
Basically, it was mostly a problem with the ASRock motherboard Ryan uses for GPU testing.
sweeper765 - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
So EVGA put all this work into lowering fan power consumption but forgot about idle noise? I find this perplexing . And i believe they had this same problem with other older models as well.Also i don't like the idea of passive cooling. Running the card at 50C for a long time is not good for longevity. I had a passive Gigabyte card in the past that after a few years was showing colored pixels on the screen.
Better to use a low rpm (<1000) for quiet operation. You're not going to hear the difference anyway because you have other components making some kind of noise in the case.
Tetracycloide - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
In fairness, idle noise is much easier, just a BIOS change. Load noise required hardware revisions.The_Assimilator - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Why use two 6-pin PCIe power connectors when a single 8-pin would do the job just fine? Would certainly cut down on the BOM, and of course cable clutter.