Upgrade to 970 from 960

G

Guest

Guest
Hello, I am trying to decide wether or not to upgrade from the 960 to the 970, Im curious if its a smart move or im jsut being an idiot.
my specs are:
Intel i5 4690k
Nvidia GTX 960 Gigabyte G1
GIGABYTE GA-Z97-HD3 MotherBoard
 
Solution
Depends on your purpose .
Do you play on 4k ? If yes then you might need it sooner . You gain around 14-30 fps gain on this upgrade. But for Full Hd no difference is visible when you are already at over 50fps.
If you can get a good deal on the 970 and sell the 960 to someone , then its fine , else not really a wise decision if you bought your 960 few months ago. Rather buy next year when nvidia launches newer cards since your mobo doesnt support SLI .

g1abhi

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Jun 13, 2015
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Depends on your purpose .
Do you play on 4k ? If yes then you might need it sooner . You gain around 14-30 fps gain on this upgrade. But for Full Hd no difference is visible when you are already at over 50fps.
If you can get a good deal on the 970 and sell the 960 to someone , then its fine , else not really a wise decision if you bought your 960 few months ago. Rather buy next year when nvidia launches newer cards since your mobo doesnt support SLI .
 
Solution
Hi,

Stating FPS as per the Best Solution isn't ideal as it is proportional to your existing performance. What you really want is to see the AVERAGE performance:

60% or 1.6X the frame rate on average:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_960_Gaming/29.html (compare STOCK 970 to 960 which is 58% at 1080p and 62% at 1440p average over about 20 Games)

Since you have a good CPU these will be very accurate.

Thus, if getting say 40FPS in a game you'll get closer to 64FPS at the same settings. That's 24FPS improvement for this example but if you were on a 144Hz monitor (probably not) then it could be over a 50FPS improvement for a game at a high frame rate.

As for saying more than 50FPS makes no difference at full HD that's just silly. For example, regardless of resolution if you want VSYNC ON and want to stay above this (to prevent stutter) then getting to 60FPS is very important.

Also, if you aren't at the highest settings this enables you to turn up the quality. Frankly, i have no idea what the HD/50FPS comment is supposed to mean.

Anyway, getting a GTX970 is also going to be a bit of future proofing for more demanding titles. In general, games are heavily tied to CONSOLE releases so we get a surge in required GPU and VRAM requirement. Not all at once, but overall. We saw this with Watchdogs when it optimized for console and had VRAM issues requiring 4GB initially to prevent stuttering.

If you have only 2GB of VRAM you will have problems running some future games.

Summary,
- 1.6X the performance on average
- if it is "worth it" is up to you.

Other:
Learn what Adaptive VSYNC is and how to use it. Basically it's for when you want to prevent screen tearing, but you also drop below the target (which causes stuttering with VSYNC ON). It also fixes the issue in a few games that auto-synch to 30FPS if you can't output at least 60FPS (like Max Payne 3).

Thus you get screen tear if you drop below 60FPS (for 60Hz monitor) but not stutter.

Adaptive VSYNC should be enabled per-game via NVidia CP-> "Manage 3D settings-> Add game-> Adaptive VSYNC-> Save"

(normally I would adjust visuals to prevent dropping below 60FPS when using VSYNC. Now i can raise visuals slightly higher since periodic screen tearing is far less of an issue to me than stutter)
 

Giroro

Splendid
Video cards have been stuck on 28nm for a long time. Once they move to a smaller node, there will be some very significant performance gains that we haven't been used to seeing for awhile. A year from now, there is a very good chance we will be seeing cards hitting the market with 2x-4x the performance as today's top cards. They could also potentially be less expensive as today's cards thanks to smaller die and PCB sizes, but Nvidia and AMD might be much more cautious about pricing this time around. Plus, there is the question of the Radeon Fury Nano. I am expecting that to be around GTX 980 performance in the ~$450 range. That may spur a price drop on the GTX 980, and by extension a (slight) drop or rebate on the 970.

And, marketing aside, you really don't want to attempt 4k gaming on any of the current generation of cards, really.

Personally I think right now is a bad time to buy high(er) end GPU. Full disclosure I just bought a Radeon R9 285 ($160 after rebate) to replace my Radeon HD 5830. I was very tempted to buy a gtx 970, but held off for the above reasons, opting for a cheaper card as a stop-gap that I will upgrade within 1-2 years instead.

If you think you will be fine with the performance of your gtx960 for another year or so, I think that you should consider waiting. If not, then upgrade asap, because the resale value is only going to drop once the rumored Gtx 950 hits the market.