Still worth buying Nvidia Geforce GTX970?

Jerry000 · Feb 11, 2016

Are there any newer cards out for same budget? Or is GTX970 still a very good buy today and for future? For gaming in high settings

Gingerbread · Feb 11, 2016

Best you can get for the budget, unless you are going to go for more than 1080p (like 1440p), then you might consider the r9 390.

Jerry000 · Feb 11, 2016

You mean this one:
http://www.mindfactory.de/product_info.php/8192MB-Asus-Radeon-R9-390-Strix-Gaming-Direct-CU-III-OC-Aktiv-PCIe-3-0-x_1008514.html

So which is better, this radeon or GTC970? They are same price range

thor220 · Feb 11, 2016

The 970's price actually went up a bit since launch and is definitely not the defacto card in that price range. Given that it's competing against the 390x (or the 390), it only has two advantages. One is that is consumes less power. If you don't have expensive electricity where you live then this isn't a factor for you. The second is a result of the first, it's a better overclocker. A 970 is a good choice if you plan on serious overclocking.

Now the advantages of the R9 390x are a bit more broad. To start, it has better DX 12 support. This will give it a boost in upcoming games. It also has double the memory and higher memory bandwidth. Games with high memory usage or those that require faster memory will benefit from this. This is already playing a role in newer games like rise of the tomb raider that require 6 GB of ram on it's highest settings. If games coming out now are benefiting we can only assume that the performance gap due to memory between the 970 and the 390x will only increase over time. It's also worth noting that because the GTX 970's last 1/2 gigabyte of RAM runs at 1/4 the speed, it suffers a large performance loss when playing games over 1080p or when vRAM usage is above 3.5 GB. Next, the R9 390x simply has more raw power. It's a larger card and has more transistors. Games that are properly optimized for it will beat out any game optimized for a 970. On top of that, because it is based on GCN architecture (what every modern AMD card is based on) it will likely have a longer support cycle than the 970. AMD will be releasing another revision of GCN this year and many more performance improvements will be handed down to every GCN card. AMD has done this last year with the Catalyst Omega drivers and again this year with Crimson drivers.

Gingerbread · Feb 11, 2016

Jerry000 :

if you are running 1080p, then the gtx 970, less heat, less power consumption. If you plan on going above 1080p, then the r9 390, but you will need a solid PSU for it, it's really power hungry.

Jerry000 · Feb 11, 2016

Does 970 have good support over DX12? I see that is compatible. So if i pick Nvidia, would you recommend any other card for gaming and to look in future? I won´t be overlocking any

thor220 · Feb 11, 2016

Jerry000 :

It's compatible but it does not support as much as the AMD solution. Even more, the GTX 970 uses software emulation for certain DX 12 features, which means that performance will suck if any of said DX 12 features are used. It does not have hardware level support for many DX 12 features.

Jerry000 · Feb 11, 2016

Is there any nvidia that does support dx12? For a good price (i know it will be a bit more expensive).
So just one more time, so is it 970 good buy for 2016 and years to come?

thor220 · Feb 11, 2016

Jerry000 :

There is no Nvidia card out right now that has good DX 12 support. As stated in my earlier posts, the 970 will only be good for you if you plan on only using 1080p for the next few years or you want to heavily overclock.

Jerry000 · Feb 11, 2016

Thank you. As i see, there are little games out for DX12 and there are not many comming soon. When do you think DX12 will become standard as it is now DX11? Is it worth waiting to get new nvidia and DX12 support or is this far away and not worth waiting?

Gingerbread · Feb 11, 2016

The answer to worth waiting depends on what is your current gpu and how long you can wait.

Jerry000 · Feb 11, 2016

Current is a laptop with integrated default graphic card. It is not gaming laptop, i can play only old games.

thor220 · Feb 11, 2016

Jerry000 :

Pascal, Nvidia's next-gen cards, are supposed to come out in a few months and will have good DX 12 support. If you can wait for that long, it would definitely be worth it.

Jerry000 · Feb 11, 2016

thor220 :

That is great

. Is there any release date? But they will be more expensive than 300€ at beginning i assume

thor220 · Feb 11, 2016

Jerry000 :

No definite release date, just the quarter they will release in. You'll be able to get a card faster than a 970 at a lower price when Pascal releases, that is a guarantee. In addition, prices of previous gen cards will lower as they always do when the next gen cards come out.

renz496 · Feb 11, 2016

Dx12 is a bit complicated topic. Right now there is no gpu which can support all DX12 feature. AMD has advantage in async compute while. only nvidia maxwell v2 have the new hardware needed for FL12_1/FL11_3. And using DX12 foes not mean it will be better than DX11. Graphical feature wise everything that can be done on DX12 can also be done in DX11. So when will DX12 become much more common like how DX11 is today? The problem with DX12 is not like previous DX version where the new DX have new exclusive graphical feature or more efficient than previous DX. DX12 is more about giving control to developer that want more control over their resource. More control means more resposibility to bear. Things that usually controlled by driver now being handled by developer themselves. So if your game have no significant bottleneck with DX11 it is better to stick with DX11 than adding necessary burden to the development team. I heard that Crystal Dymanic mention that they will not going to patch the new TR with DX12 on PC until they can see better performance and stability vs DX11 version of the game.

Non-Euclidean · Feb 11, 2016

Thanks for the info on DX-12, I already had some of the pieces with feature X on AMD vs feature Y on Maxwell 2. There there was demo Z still not past beta proving nothing at all about DX-12.

So basically its a hodgepodge with the 2 graphics cards giants going in different ways and game developers taking it slow. Which means by the time there are games using it, there will be Pascal cards.

renz496 · Feb 11, 2016

to me outside triple A or sponsored game we might not see much DX12 in action.

thor220 · Feb 11, 2016

renz496 :

I personally like the features that DX 12 brings but the way the market is going may hurt it's adoption rate. If AMD and Nvidia both have different DX 12 feature sets, game makers are going to avoid features that are exclusive to either party. In addition, not everyone likes windows 10. I tried it but eventually moved on because that thing would not stop wasting my data on contacting Mircosoft. Has anyone been reading the news lately? It was just found out that even with all the "phone home" options of windows 10 turned off, it still contacts microsoft over 1,900 times a day over a total of 20 unique IP addresses.

renz496 · Feb 11, 2016

Personally while some of DX12 feature is interesting to me but in general i'm not too excited with DX12. With DX12 you will be giving control to developer on how they want to optimize their game on your gpu. But then again look again the state of triple A game these days. After launching their games they still busy releasing patch to fix thsir games. Now you want to add their burden to optimize many gpu out there? Mantle should give use the glimpse of what could happen. Just look performance regressing in Mantle vs DX11 for GCN 1.2. That is just some minor architecture change. So what about future hardware? Sometimes we play one game for years. Will developer willing to patch in optimization for new architecture or will they going to leave it as it is. It would be a joke if DX11 end up faster with new hardware vs DX12 when it was the opposite with current hardware.

thor220 · Feb 11, 2016

renz496 :

Yeah I'd take backwards compatibility anyday over a potential performance boost. Knowing many devs., they'll lean on DX 12 as a crutch to easily improve performance when their code is more jumbled than a clown's room. Good game devs have found ways to optimize.

Metalwell · Feb 11, 2016

I wanted to get the same GPU as well, but I decided to wait till the end of this summer, Nvidia will be releasing Pascal cards. 10x better than Maxwell cards / 970 / .

renz496 · Feb 11, 2016

Sometimes dev are nit the problem. But publisher is. The onr that pushing unrealistic release date usually publisher. If anything they want to cash in their invesment ASAP. The game are getting bigger and complex but they still retain 2 years development cycle. Releasing day one patch and bug fixing become a common practice. Good thing that digital store like steam start offering refund options.

thor220 · Feb 12, 2016

renz496 :

Game Devs need to form a union. They get crap hours and they are forced to burn the one thing they really like.

renz496 · Feb 12, 2016

That's why some choose the way of indie and choose to use kickstart to develop their games like star citizen.

Still worth buying Nvidia Geforce GTX970?

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