GTX 760 SLI 2GB vs single 970

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GamerBro10

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A few months ago I purchased one GTX 760 2GB to go alongside my old GTX 760 for an SLI setup and I have been considering a 970 as an upgrade. It is an EVGA card still within the 90 day period for the step up program so I am wondering if I should keep my SLI setup or have one 970? It would cost about $100 but I had a few questions to consider...

1. The main concern I have with the SLI setup is the vram and having a rig that will be "future proof" for a decent amount of time. I game @ 1080p and I want something that will allow me to play any new upcoming games at max settings and I feel the vram limits that despite having more graphics processing power.

2. The whole 970 vram frequency issue... Is that a concern or issue since I really only want to upgrade because of the vram. Will I only have 3.5gb and if I exceed that to start to see issues? Was the whole 3.5/.5 design with all of nvidia cards or just the 970?

3. Is it worth it to get a 4gb card or will there be games using more then that soon? 4gb seems to be the norm now but back when I got the first 760, 2gb was fine. Will having only 4gb quickly become too little so that waiting for the next generation of cards be a better investment?

4. Kind of an awkward question... but can you have two different cards (1 760 and 1 970) in a system and have them work independtly? Not for SLI of course I know that impossible. I mean each card powering a different monitor mainly for multiboxing so that one card renders 2 clients at max res on monitor one and the other card rendering another client at max res for monitor 2?

Thanks!
 
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1. There is no such thing as future proof. Worshiping at the altar of "max" settings is an exercise in futility. It's very easy for devs to add a "max" setting that will bring any machine to its knees. It may only improve visual quality a little, but take a huge amount of system resources. If you want to play games at settings that make them look good, the GTX 970 is a great option for 1080p (so are sli'd 760s) Just because games can use more than 3.5GB of RAM at 1080p, doesn't mean that doing so makes things look better.

2. You should think of the 970 as having 3.5 GB of VRAM. While other cards in the past have had similar issues, the 970 is the only current card affected.

3. No. AMD's 4gb options are great, but having that extra...
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Calculagator

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1. There is no such thing as future proof. Worshiping at the altar of "max" settings is an exercise in futility. It's very easy for devs to add a "max" setting that will bring any machine to its knees. It may only improve visual quality a little, but take a huge amount of system resources. If you want to play games at settings that make them look good, the GTX 970 is a great option for 1080p (so are sli'd 760s) Just because games can use more than 3.5GB of RAM at 1080p, doesn't mean that doing so makes things look better.

2. You should think of the 970 as having 3.5 GB of VRAM. While other cards in the past have had similar issues, the 970 is the only current card affected.

3. No. AMD's 4gb options are great, but having that extra memory does not give them any better performance. The GTX 980 is way overpriced compared to the marginally better performance over the 970. Unless you can find a way to assign a dollar value to enjoyment of higher gaming performance, waiting will always be a better investment.

4. This depends on your OS, program, and what your expectations are. Both gpus can drive screens. The 760 can also be used as a dedicated Physx processor to boost supported games. You may be able to use both if you launch two separate instances of your game, but that may require additional software. I have used multiple GPUs, but I have no experience working with multiple clients.
 
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GamerBro10

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1. For 1 I should have said lasting length, as in which of the two options would option would become dated slower for future games considering I have the 2GB models.

4. And for 4... I run Windows 8.1 64-bit and the only game I was considering for multiboxing was EVE online. Currently I am able to multibox with 3 clients max settings @ 60fps no problem even with a single 760. Its mainly the large scale types of fights where I want to be able to have all 3 clients, again 2 alt-tabbing on my main monitor on one card, and my second card to my other monitor with another client.

 
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Calculagator

Calculagator

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Unless you upgrade your resolution or use significant anti-aliasing, you are going to be able to play new games at good settings for quite some time with either option. Battlefield 4 runs faster at 1080p on sli'd 760s, but faster at 4k on a 970. You can see a basic comparison between the two options here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2015-vga-charts/compare,3664.html?prod%5B7398%5D=on&prod%5B7347%5D=on
The almost double memory and newer architecture of the 970 does give it some advantages, but the 760s never trail by so much as to hinder quality game play.
 
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