GTX 970 Question

[chumps52]

I'm looking for a new GPU in the region of around £300; and was wondering if the GTX 970 was still a good buy, as apparently it has some issues with it's VRAM?
Or is there another (Nvidia) card that would perform better for the same price? I am looking to buy within the next week or so.

Thanks!

EDIT: I am currently using an ASUS GTX 660 Ti with 2GB VRAM, and an i5 3570k.

 

[G-STAR01]

In your price range the GTX 970 is the best performing Nvidia card.
It also offers the best performance to value.
As for the VRAM 'issue', it's advertised as 4GB but only 3.5GB is available, the remaining 500mb is used internally in a different way.
If you game at 1080p, I wouldn't worry about it.

 

[tjcoops]

The GTX970 is a great card for the price and the price/performance ratio is only matched by the R9 290X in this class of cards. The VRAM issue isn't a problem at the moment, 3.5GB is realistically useable and the other 500MB is around 6x slower. It's like using virtual memory on your PC, it's there and by all means you can use it but it's slow as hell and you'd rather not.

You won't find a better performing nVidia card for the price and the argument for getting the R9 290X over the GTX 970 because it has full use of its 4GB of VRAM isn't too meaningful because at the end of the day both of these GPUs will not be serving great frame rates when using this amount of VRAM

 

[chumps52]

In your price range the GTX 970 is the best performing Nvidia card.
It also offers the best performance to value.
As for the VRAM 'issue', it's advertised as 4GB but only 3.5GB is available, the remaining 500mb is used internally in a different way.
If you game at 1080p, I wouldn't worry about it.

Ok great, thanks!

 

[chumps52]

The GTX970 is a great card for the price and the price/performance ratio is only matched by the R9 290X in this class of cards. The VRAM issue isn't a problem at the moment, 3.5GB is realistically useable and the other 500MB is around 6x slower. It's like using virtual memory on your PC, it's there and by all means you can use it but it's slow as hell and you'd rather not.

You won't find a better performing nVidia card for the price and the argument for getting the R9 290X over the GTX 970 because it has full use of its 4GB of VRAM isn't too meaningful because at the end of the day both of these GPUs will not be serving great frame rates when using this amount of VRAM

Thank you for this!
So do you think that the 970 will allow me to play at the highest settings on the latest games? I have 2 23" 1080p monitors, but only actually game on one (other is just for general stuff, eg Spotify).
I did look at the 290X but some places said it actually performed worse in some situations compared with the 970.

 

[G-STAR01]

If you're gaming at 1080p (one monitor), you can crank them to the highest and most of the latest should still give very good fps with both cards.
The performance is fairly similar, I think the GTX 970 has the edge @ 1080p and the 290X @ 1440p.
The problem with the 290X is that it consumes an absurd amount of power.

 

[chumps52]

If you're gaming at 1080p (one monitor), you can crank them to the highest and most of the latest should still give very good fps with both cards.
The performance is fairly similar, I think the GTX 970 has the edge @ 1080p and the 290X @ 1440p.
The problem with the 290X is that it consumes an absurd amount of power.

Great, thanks! I saw that about the 290X's power; it's like double the 970's

 

[tjcoops]

I've got an MSI GTX 970 and I play everything at the highest settings at 1080p, always getting over 60fps in games like Bat,an, Mortal Kombat, BF4, Crysis 3 and the like. The only exception is Project Cars on max when it is raining which really stresses it, but when its not raining I get really good frame rates, that game is known to bring even the GTX 980 down to its knees when its raining so its not an issue.

And you're right about the power, a decent 500W PSU can easily power an i5 + GTX 970 setup but you'd definitely need a lot more powerful PSU to power an i5 + 290X system.

 

[chumps52]

I've got an MSI GTX 970 and I play everything at the highest settings at 1080p, always getting over 60fps in games like Bat,an, Mortal Kombat, BF4, Crysis 3 and the like. The only exception is Project Cars on max when it is raining which really stresses it, but when its not raining I get really good frame rates, that game is known to bring even the GTX 980 down to its knees when its raining so its not an issue.

And you're right about the power, a decent 500W PSU can easily power an i5 + GTX 970 setup but you'd definitely need a lot more powerful PSU to power an i5 + 290X system.

Ah ok great, thanks for the help + info!