I'm having an interesting pickle of a time with these cards. You can read the whole story over at the EVGA forums here:
http://forums.evga.com/35GB-of-vram-on-GTX-970-SSC-I-cant-believe-Im-writing-this-m2362881.aspx
To summarize. I'm only running one GTX 970 at a time, I don't have the resources to SLI them currently, but I could if I was really invested in it (I'd need a new PSU and an SLI bridge)
I bought a 970 back in February and it ran AMAZING. No issues at all. And absolutely zero evidence of any "3.5gb" problem. Though at the time, the only game I had that was pushing it over 3.5gb of vram was my heavily modded Skyrim. The point is, the card has performed in games flawlessly for what it is.
Fast forward to last month. I buy another identical make and model GTX 970 (The EVGA SSC Version) for my girlfriend's computer that we're slowly building.
Fast forward to last weekend. My Older 970 ssc has it's DVI port burn out. So I'm about to RMA it. I put my girlfriends 970 into my computer, since we're still buying her parts for her new computer, she can't use the 970, so no problem. The other 970 is packed up in a box, waiting to be carted off to the UPS store.
I load up Batman Arkham Knight, which my older 970 chewed through no problem, and what do I find? Stuttering when the card goes over 3.5gb of vram. ;_;
Now my Original GTX 970 handled Batman Arkham Knight just fine. There were points where the frame RATE would drop considerably, during times of heavy movement, such as gliding or bat mobile or fighting lots of enemies at once, but Batman AK is one of the worst PC ports in recent history. STILL, I was getting a solid 50-60 fps on foot, and 35-45 in the bat mobile when the game wasn't shitting itself. Provided the makers of that game can fix those areas, it'll be a beautifully mastered game. There was no frame stutter or frame dropping
Now my newer 970 doesn't perform as well as my older 970. When it goes above 3.5gb of vram usage, there is stuttering, unfortunately, it's very very intermittent. Sometimes it's so bad, you can't even play the game, but others, it's extremely subtle, so much to the point you can't even see it.
I decided to load up Assassin's Creed Unity, since that's another newer game that uses tons of vram, and while the game was only running at about 30 fps, it was a steady 30 fps, and it was using over 3.5 gb of vram, there was much less stutter. Unfortunately, I am afraid the only way I can really test these cards for this "Stuttering" issue is to SLI them together, because in my personal findings, I'm finding that these cards run out of raw horse power long before they cap out their vram. I decided to push a lot of my other games in DSR to higher resolutions than my monitor can provide. What I found time and again was that the GPU of the card physically couldn't handle the higher resolutions, and the vram usually hovered around 2.5 or 3. Dragon Age Inquisition, DSR to 4k, ULTRA MAX settings....only 3 gigs of vram, only 20 fps, dipping to 15fps during movement. Found similar results in other games.
What does this mean? It means that if you plan on running only one GTX 970 at 1080 and 60Hz, then the chance of you encountering "3.5gate" is extremely low. In order to get acceptable frame rates (40+, ideally, a solid 60) in newer games, you'll have to adjust the settings such that the game itself wont even be using over 3.5gb of vram. And if you get lucky (Like I did with my first GTX 970) when it does go over 3.5gb of vram, you won't see stuttering at all any way.
One interesting note. My Newer GTX 970 has Elpida Memory Modules, and is running a newer BIOS version. My older GTX 970, which gets slightly better performance and has never ever exhibited any frame stuttering, uses Samsung Ram and has an older BIOS. Another user on the EVGA forums confirmed that in the past, those of his graphics cards he got with Samsung ram modules always ran better.
For reference, My system is:
CPU: i5 2500k OC to 3.9Ghz
Motherboard: p8p67-m Pro (rev 3.0)
Ram: Corsair Dominator DDR3, 2x4gb (1600Mhz)
GPU: 1x EVGA GTX 970 SSC (1493 Core Clock, and 7000 memory Clock) (I can OC the older 970 to 1590~ and 7500, the gains are amazing)
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