GPU recommendation 4k gaming please help!

Not a big deal according to site articles, including those on toms. The conclusion
was, for all the heat & shouting about it, none of it changes how the card behaved
in reviews, namely very well.

Plus, given its general performance level, if one was playing any kind of game where
one could be using as much as 4GB VRAM, then quite likely that's a game which is
beyond the basic performance ceiling of a 970 anyway (ie. certain games heavily
modded such as Skyrim, or if playing at 4K with some titles), in which case one ought
to be looking at something more powerful by default, like the 980.

Waiting for the 3K series might not result in your deciding to get one of AMD's new
models, but at the very least it should bring down NVIDIA's prices, so there's still
something to gain by waiting. OTOH, one can't wait forever; it's the usual desire-trap
with PC hw, there's always something better round the corner.

In your shoes, if the need isn't immediate, and assuming AMD doesn't pull something
utterly awesome out of its hat (by that I mean a real breakthrough in noise/power levels
which they've been bad on for a while now), I'd wait for AMD's cards, let the pricing war
settle and buy two 980s. In my experience of dealing with both brands, you'll have less
driver probs with NVIDIA overall (I have several dozen GPUs, benched both sides over
the years, I always encounter many more issues dealing with CF setups than SLI, so
many odd glitches, freezes, app hiccups, etc. which just don't happen so much with
SLI configs).

If AMD could radically improve their driver quality, they'd be a much stronger force in
this market. However, that and the noise/power issue keeps making me choose NVIDIA.

Hmm, the only minor issue which annoys me about NVIDIA's drivers is the way the
AF image quality setting automatically flips to Clamp when I force the AF factor away
from Auto (if I have it set to Performance then it should stay that way unless I change it).


Btw, i7Baby is right, there's no data to 'flesh out' the 970 RAM issue because
none of it changes how it behaves re initial site reveiws, and so far nobody
has been able to demonstrate any game that suffers as a result. It's hard
even to show the issue with synthetic tests. If anything it's quite a nice
design (ie. for the target market, not really a factor at all), but certainly a PR
screwup that should have been avoided. Thus, in terms of attaining >980
performance at minimal cost, two 970s are nice, but for 4K I'd still err in
favour of two 980s, or one initially and a 2nd later.

Ian.

PS. With your CPU not being oc'd, and depending on the game, you could well
end up being CPU-bottlenecked with more than one 980 in some cases. Very
much depends on the game though, in most cases you should be fine.