GTX 970; a good buy now or wait?

koslov

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May 8, 2013
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So I've decided to upgrade to a GTX 970 which seems to be the cheapest of the high-end cards offered by Nvidia.

Should I buy it now or am I close enough to Nvidia's release cycle that waiting it out for a few more months would be best in case a new card that gives me more for my money in the GTX 970's price range is released?
 
You will always get a better deal if you wait long enough. Nvidia's next release should be a significant upgrade, but it probably won't be out until around the middle of next year. It could come earlier, but it would be amazing to see it much before April.
 
If you plan on waiting you will always be waiting. Something better is always around the corner, unless we are within a few months of a new release (we arent) there is no point in waiting for a "better" deal. Prices will stay the same as time goes on until new gen cards are released, which is at least 6 months away.

Get the 970, it is an astounding card.
 

garneroutlaw

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I say wait. The 970 was a good buy 4-5 months ago, not so much right now. The only card that I would recommend right now is the 390x or 390. I would say get something like a 950 to hold yourself over until next spring, but it just doesn't have enough juice. Get a 390x if you can't wait. It will outperform a 970, has plenty of VRAM if you ever want to crossfire, and it's a safe bet with DX12.
 

xStampede

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Nvidia is far behind in DX12 as shown by benchmarks of first DX12 game Ashes of Singularity, 390 beats GTX 980 Ti in DirectX 12, Nvidia cards doesn't have async compute which is pretty important for DX12. 3 year old AMD cards will outpermorm Nvidia in games that support DirectX12 which will be all games ported from console and games that will come out 6 months from now. Because older AMD GPU's work great in DX12, the adoption of it will be much faster as there is a huge part of peopole that have AMD GCN based GPU's, not to mention all consoles have AMD GCN ahritecture too, current Nvidia GPU's will be obsolete in half a year.

All sources here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/3j2wpj/x_post_rpcgaming_nvidia_gpus_do_not_support_dx12/
 
So far I see people take big assumption in regard to DX12 and Async. Async is OPTIONAL feature in DX12. To use Async or not it is up to developer. Not something that MUST be use in order to use DX12. In unreal engine 4 slide they mention the usage of Async must be done with cautions because it can lead to more unpredictable performance. Right now people only focusing on Maxwell and GCN. But there were test shown that GTX770 able to increase performance from 19FPS to 55FPS in AoS going from DX11 to DX12. And they say Kepler cannot use Async at all.
 

koslov

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Thanks for the replies so far; looks like I'm going for the 970. MSI seems to be the best all-around brand.

One more remaining question:

How significant is the difference between the MSI GTX 970 4GD5T OC vs GTX 970 GAMING 4G?
 

xStampede

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MSI don't have active VRAM cooling, Gigabyte 970 G1 Gaming has highest core boost to 1392Mhz and ut runs cool and silent with active contact with VRAM for cooling.

About Nvidia and lack of Async compute in their GPU's:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dnn0rgDaSro&feature=youtu.be