The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Review: Featuring EVGA
by Ryan Smith on September 26, 2014 10:00 AM ESTBattlefield 4
Our latest addition to our benchmark suite and our current major multiplayer action game of our benchmark suite is Battlefield 4, DICE’s 2013 multiplayer military shooter. After a rocky start, Battlefield 4 has finally reached a point where it’s stable enough for benchmark use, giving us the ability to profile one of the most popular and strenuous shooters out there. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, based on our experiences our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, which means a card needs to be able to average at least 60fps if it’s to be able to hold up in multiplayer.
In Battlefield 4 resolution makes all the difference. AMD’s 4K advantage is in full force here, while that solid lead errodes and the GTX 970 catches up for 1440p and 1080p..
Looking at just the NVIDIA lineup for a second, while not even GTX 980 was able to cross 60fps at 1440p, it does prove that its 17% performance advantage counts for something by being able to push framerates in the high 50s, all while GTX 970 can’t even crack 50fps. EVGA’s FTW overclock will get you there though, and for that matter it can even cross the 60fps mark at 4K.
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Casecutter - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
I’m confident in if we had two of what where the normal "AIB OC customs" of both a 970 and 290 things between might not appear so skewed. First as much as folks want this level of card to get them into 4K, there not... So it really just boils down to seeing what similarly generic OC custom offer and say "spar back and forth" @2560x1440 depending on the titles.As to power I wish these reviews would halt the inadequate testing like it’s still 2004! The power (complete PC) should for each game B-M’d, and should record in retime the oscillation of power in milliseconds, then output the 'mean' over the test duration. As we know each title fluctuates boost frequency across every title, the 'mean' across each game is different. Then each 'mean' can be added and the average from the number of titles would offer to most straight-forward evaluation of power while gaming. Also, as most folk today "Sleep" their computers (and not many idle for more than 10-20min) I believe the best calculation for power is what a graphics card "suckles" while doing nothing like 80% each month. I’d more like to see how AMD ZeroCore impacts a machines power usage over a months’ time, verse the savings only during gaming. Consider gaming 3hr a day which constitutes 12.5% of a month, does the 25% difference in power gaming beat the 5W saved with Zerocore 80% of that month. Saving energy while using and enjoying something is fine, although wasting watts while doing nothing is incomprehensible.
Impulses - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
Ehh, I recently bought 2x custom 290, but I've no doubt that even with a decent OC the 970 can st the very least still match it in most games... I don't regret the 290s, but I also only paid $350/360 for my WF Gigabyte cards, had I paid closer to $400 I'd be kicking myself right about now.Iketh - Monday, September 29, 2014 - link
most PCs default to sleeping during long idles and most people shut it offdragonsqrrl - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Maxwell truly is an impressive architecture, I just wish Nvidia would stop further gimping double precision performance relative to single precision with each successive generation of their consumer cards. GF100/110 were capped at 1/8, GK110 was capped at 1/24, and now GM204 (and likely GM210) is capped at 1/32... What's still yet to be seen is how they're capping the performance on GM204, whether it's a hardware limitation like GK104, or a clock speed limitation in firmware like GK110.Nvidia: You peasants want any sort of reasonable upgrade in FP64 performance? Pay up.
D. Lister - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
"Company X: You peasants want any sort of reasonable upgrade in product Y? Pay up."Well, that's capitalism for ya... :p. Seriously though, if less DP ability means a cheaper GPU then as a gamer I'm all for it. If a dozen niche DP hobbyists get screwed over, and a thousand gamers get a better deal on a gaming card then why not? Remember what all that bit mining nonsense did to the North American prices of the Radeons?
D. Lister - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
Woah, it seems they do tags differently here at AT :(. Sorry if the above message appears improperly formatted.Mr Perfect - Friday, September 26, 2014 - link
It's not you, the italic tag throws in a couple extra line breaks. Bold might too, I seem to remember that mangling a post of mine in the past.D. Lister - Sunday, September 28, 2014 - link
Oh, okay, thanks for the explanation :).wetwareinterface - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
this^you seem to be under the illusion that nvidia intended to keep shooting themselves in the foot forever in regards to releasing their high end gpgpu chip under a gaming designation and relying on the driver (which is easy to hack) to keep people from buying a gamer card for workstation loads. face it they wised up and charge extra for fp64 and the higher ram count now. no more cheap workstation cards. the benefit as already described is cheaper gaming cards that are designed to be more efficient at gaming and leave the workstation loads to the workstation cards.
dragonsqrrl - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
This is only partially true, and I think D. Lister basically suggested the same thing so I'll just make a single response for both. The argument for price and efficiency would really only be the case for a GK104 type scenario, where on die FP64 performance is physically limited to 1/24 FP32 due to there being 1/24 the Cuda cores. But what about GK110? There is no reason to limit it to 1/24 SP other than segmentation. There's pretty much no efficiency or price argument there, and we see proof of that in the Titan, no less efficient at gaming and really no more expensive to manufacture outside the additional memory and maybe some additional validation. In other words there's really no justification (or at least certainly not the justification you guys are suggesting) for why the GTX780 Ti couldn't have had 1/12 SP with 3GB GDDR5 at the same $700 MSRP, for instance. Of course other than further (and in my opinion unreasonable) segmentation.This is why I was wondering how they're capping performance in GM204.