Truthfully, yes. Yes it is. The following is purely opinion, don't take it as gospel, take it as what it is, an opinion. My specs are an i7 4790k @ 4.4Ghz, ASUS Z97A USB 3.1 Motherboard, 8GB DDR3 1600 Mhz 9-9-9-27 1T, EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SSC.
I just recently purchased the EVGA GTX970 SSC and tested a few games out with it; Namely Fallout 4 and GTA V since those seem to be the most graphically demanding games I have on hand and with GTA V I was able to set everything to Ultra/Long Shadows and Extended Shadows both sliders in advanced graphics set to 50% also have MSAA set to 2x and TXAA on along with FXAA and just running around in the city I was sitting pretty at around 65+ FPS, mind you this is @ 1080. My VRAM usage for that game hit 3.2 GB, Fallout 4 I set everything to Ultra, except Godrays which is set @ high and my VRAM usage was sitting @ around 2.5 GB and I was pulling a fluid 60 FPS. I'm sure with a little bit of tweaking I could probably get those results @ 1440 with lowering some of the more heavy graphics settings, but nonetheless the card is a very capable card even @ 1440.
I actually tried using DSR and setting it to 1440 with the same settings on GTA V and VRAM hit over 3.9 GB and I did not see one bit of stuttering with the "slower .5 GB" being used as most "Doom and Gloomers" would like you to think happens; although I was only able to hit a tops of 51 FPS, still with all settings the same as @ 1080p and to pull those kinds of numbers I'm sure lowering the advanced graphics settings down a notch will net me that 10 FPS to hit the golden 60 FPS. I also overclocked my card and retested; I pushed the core +120/mem +450 and checked again @ 1080, with the same VRAM usage I was hitting 87 FPS tops and averaging about 72 FPS, and 58 with DSR on @ 1440. So, the card, again is a very capable card if it's able to run those games with those settings like that (granted I also have an i7 4790k) with the overclocking headroom and capabilities to almost match a GTX980 baseline in performance.
On the other side of the spectrum there's the R9 390, it has 8GB of VRAM.. yet performs marginally better even @ 1440 while consuming (on average) 80W more power.. which begs to question.. is that 8GB really necessary? I'm almost certain by the time games start using that much VRAM the card itself will be obsolete, or performing poorly. Also, AMD having the upper-hand with DX12 is nil to me. DX12 probably will not see wide adoption until a few years from now, and by that time there will be much better cards out there to run the latest games.
AMD (to me at least) has a bad track record with their drivers, and just based off of personal experience (19+ years 4 AMD/ATI and 7 Nvidia cards) with GPU's -- Nvidia has always seemed to have the best support. AMD cards performed great, when they worked and the driver itself was good, which, honestly was 50/50.. and that to me doesn't bode well for a company who's financials aren't exactly great when trying to win new customers. Sure, they perform well now, but it's well after the fact and Nvidia has gained so much ground in terms of market share.. and truthfully I can't back AMD anymore, they were my go-to for computer performance and now I'm staying away until they can figure out what they want to do with their hardware, I'm not going to buy into future tech with the mindset of it eventually working great, I want my hardware to work solid now, and that's what Intel/Nvidia has been providing me as of late. I miss the good ol' Athlon XP (Barton cores)/Athlon 64 days when AMD had a performance advantage with a lower price to boot, but alas Intel got their act together and AMD got too complacent and now look at how the tables turned. 🙁
Recently I just took out an R9 380 w/ 4GB, it seemed like everytime I tried to do a clean install on the drivers I had to use onboard video through the CPU just to reinstall the drivers as the screen was so badly distorted and unusable. To boot, from past experiences with Catalyst and now Crimson it seems like AMD is still sub-par at best with their driver support. Nvidia on the other hand has always been stellar for me. Hell, I recently fired up an old computer with a GTX 560Ti, was able to download the latest drivers from Nvidia and it detected and installed and ran games, granted at lower graphics setting since it only has 1GB of VRAM and considering it was budget mid-ranged when I bought it I wasn't expecting it to perform like it did. Granted, I have ran into issues with Nvidia (poor performance, lag in some games, heat issues) but since Nvidia has so many driver releases that provide solid performance I was able to roll back or reinstall and it usually fixed the issue, with AMD I had to experiment with drivers just to find a good one.
It just seems, again to me, that with Nvidia I get the advertised performance out of the box more often than not, if not within the first week or so with AMD it takes a few drivers but eventually things start coming around.. that's off-putting to me as a consumer, I don't want to wait 3-4 months for them to get their act together, I paid good money for their product, I want it to work as advertised. Sure, Nvidia misled customers with the 3.5GB + .5 GB fiasco, which is shitty, and I can't help but fault the company for that, but nonetheless the card still does what it's good at and has been good at since it's release and that's provide great performance.
YMMV, but the GTX 970 is a solid card, and if a GTX 560Ti (5 year old card) can run GTA V (one of the most graphically demanding games on the market released in 2015 for the PC) @ 1080 with normal settings (again a budget mid-ranged card with 1GB VRAM), what do you think a 970 (upper-mid range/low high end with 3.5 + .5 GB VRAM) card will be able to do 2-3 years from now?
One last thing, I've owned more AMD CPU's than Intel. Hell, I've only ever used Intel in two builds and that's including my current build. I passed on a Sandy Bridge i7 2600k in favor of a Phenom II x6 1090T because I had more trust for AMD than Intel, but again.. AMD hasn't made any strides to follow their original mantra of IPC vs Clock Speed (from the XP/A64 days) as it seems like they're more about clock speed than IPC now.
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