gtx 1070 or 970

Its your choice. But i would wait. Also i would wait what's AMD can offer in the market.

1070 will be better for sure. 8gb of memory and higher clock speed than the 970. It will probably be a bit slower than a 980ti. If you must get a 970 due to budget,check the used market as they'll be some floodng the market once the new cards launch. 970 is still a great card it's what I'm using now.

Wait ...

1. When the 1070 drops, it will sens 970 prices south
2. You'll want more time to wait for the non-refernce cards to drop
3. You'll want some more time for the reviews to sort out who is "top dog"
4. You'll want to read tear-down articles like this one to see what you are getting component and PCB cooling wise from each vendor.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2014/09/19/nvidia-geforce-gtx-970-review/1

while the initial thought of 1070 being cheaper than 980 yet stronger, you need to keep in mind that the 980 was a terrible product price/performance wise, so wouldnt be hard for next gen 1070 to compete and beat on both points

and what are your "needs"? terms of resolution and gaming type?

since we are so far along like the others i strongly suggest you wait
for 2 main reasons, covered by

and


specially the AMD VS Nvidia round up compare is gonna be exciting to see who will get you more "bang for your buck"

right now i suggest the strength of discipline and patience to wait and see a couple of months for reviews, price, and partner cards, and AMD like the other guys pointed out

personally i was already disappointed enough by the 1080, im holding out to see the 1080ti and AMD's offerings

I don't see AMD being competitive in the top 3 cards slots (xx70 and up) .... they haven't been for quite a while outside those who will never OC their GFX cards. AMD has been aggressively overclocking their cards in the box and it worked fairly well w/ the 2xx series. But when ya can take on company's flagship card and OC it 31% whereas the others flagship tops out at just 6%, the fact that they are competitive "outta the box" becomes irrelevant. Yes, AMD did better at 4k, but a) it's such a small % of the market, it didn't provide any financial boost, b) I don't see 4k taking off till it can do 144 hz and monitors arrive with DPO 1.4 ports and c) Nothing as yet exists to drive 4k at > 60 fps consistently in today's top games.

The 380 / 380x slot has been the only medium to upper tier slot for which they have been competitive, The 970 all by itself outsold every AMD 2xx and 3xx series cards (that's something like 25 different cards) combined by a factor of 2:1. This puts a big hurt on AMDs ability to negotiate volume pricing and throw money at R&D.

In my heart of hearts, I really hope that AMD can pull one out this round and stop the precipitous decline in market share ... but my head says it ain't going to happen.

The 7xx should have taught us that the 980 was a "sucker buy". When you can buy two 970s that outperform the 980 by 40% for the same price, you are starting in the hole from the getgo. On the other hand, nVidia tried real hard to gimp the 970s performance, even artificially lowering the cards thottling point by an extra 5C. They have been stepping up this effort ever since the 5xx series when twin 560 Tis outperformed the 580 by 40% and yet were $100 cheaper. The did this successfully w/ the 960, where two 960s in SLI couldn't quite catch the 970. Will they succeed this time around in making the 1080 more attractive versus twin 1070s ? Time will tell.

An yes, the 980 had a struggle from the getgo ... the 780 was a reasonable buy when we didn't know (well not with absolute certainty) the 780 Ti was coming ... and even after when the 780 dropped almost $200. We shuda guessed it was there sitting on a shelf somewhere so to speak when it was widely rumored that the 780 that we saw was originally planned to be the 770 and each model got bumped a notch pushing the 780 into the closet. But as soon as the 980 Ti dropped, the Ti became irrelevant leaving many who invested in it w/ a severe case of buyer's remorse.

yes but one can hope, like you said, which i also do, that AMD will finally step up,

but since OP didnt specify his needs it just seems prudent to wait and see what AMD brings this summer, if, even if on the odd chance, they might bring some competition in price/performance range on the 1070, despite however past experiences might deem unlikely
or if they as rumoured, bring something price/performance competitive to the 1080p market

personally i dont think it matters since we are so close, even if they got nothing to bring, one might aswell just wait and see, the wait might just give a cheaper 970 anyway