GTX 970 or GTX 980?

[Amedinno]

Hello! I'm planning to get myself a gaming rig and I will be using a 2K/4K (Didn't decide yet) monitor.

Which option is the best for me?

EVGA GTX 970 4GB Superclocked ACX 2.0 SLI vs EVGA GTX 980 4GB FTW ACX 2.0

 

[ikethehero]

Hello! I'm planning to get myself a gaming rig and I will be using a 2K/4K (Didn't decide yet) monitor.

Which option is the best for me?

EVGA GTX 970 4GB Superclocked ACX 2.0 SLI vs EVGA GTX 980 4GB FTW ACX 2.0

970sli

 

[Amedinno]

Why and why not pls.

 

[chenw]

A single 980 is not going to give you playable rates at 4k because it simply isn't powerful enough. For less than $200 on top of the 980, you can get 970 sli, which offers dramatically more performance for the money spent (this statement assumes that, on average, your games scale 50% on the second GPU).

Simply put, I can see the reason why people go for a single 980 at 1440p or 1080p over SLI 970's, as not all games scale, but those that do, SLI 970 will, more often than not, trump a single 980. This is more important in 4k as it is more likely to be the deciding factor between playable and unplayable.

For 2k, a single 970 is more than enough juice on its own to play almost all games at very high settings. At such high fps, 980 is not going to make much of a difference.

 

[thismafiaguy]

For 4K, you'll definitely want SLI 970s because the 980 hasn't got enough raw power to run 4K smoothly all on its own. The GPU market has been rather stale in the last two years, and performance advancement has been slow. To be honest, I don't think GPUs are quite ready for 4K gaming just yet, despite all the marketing hype. I would wait and see what AMD will bring to the table this year. Their new flagship is due to arrive sometime in the near future, and maybe Nvidia will respond with something even better.

If you need something right now to play 4K, 970 SLI should do the trick. But if you want to make the most of your money, I would wait and keep my ear to the ground. Just so you know, the GTX 980 and 970 aren't the big Maxwells, kind of like how the 680 was to the 780, Kepler vs big Kepler.

 

[Amedinno]

970 SLI.

 

[JUICEhunter]

If you're looking for the best overall experience a single faster GPU will deliver.

I'd even recommend a 970 and G-sync monitor as it does so much, just got mine and it eliminates so many issues that regular monitors have.

 

[Quinnsten]

Speaking from experience I currently have a 4k monitor with 970's sli'd and I can honestly say you would be better off waiting for cards with higher vram if you intend on playing all the new games at ultra textures at 4k resolution as allot of new games are pushing past 4gb vram for example Assassins creed unity although I believe it is just a broken game at the moment uses well beyond 4gb vram same can be said for farcry 4 at 4k ultra textures and I also believe BF4 also goes beyond 4gb vram but I am yet to try bf4. I would recommend waiting till some high vram cards come out even tho 4k does look awesome.

 

[chenw]

There is also the whole 'games are not designed with 4k in mind' arguments, mostly stems from bad UI scaling and texture optimisation.

UI scaling problem, and the existence of DSR, were my main reasons to not go 4k.

 

[JUICEhunter]

4k gaming is a tall order, you can see what it's all about with DSR settings but it devourers all but the fastest setups, I personally prefer high refresh rate @2-3k resolution (on my 1080p screen).