GTX 970, Unsatisfying performance

[Buchinski13]

On a trip to Paris, I purchased the titular graphics card, alongside 8GB of RAM, upgrading from my GTX 560ti and 4GB of RAM, respectively. My current system specs are the following:

GPU: MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G
CPU: Intel Quad Core i7-2600k 3.4GHz
Memory: 8GB RAM
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Screen: 1920x1080

With a system like this I was convinced that I could play HD games at high resolutions at a fluid frame rate (60 FPS at least). Unfortunately, this has not been the case. I have tested the graphics card capability through games (Battlefield 4 and Titanfall) and demos (The Evil Within, Apollo 11 demo (Powered by Unreal Engine 4) and the Heaven Benchmark (Powered by Unigine)).

With Battlefield 4 and Titanfall, I set the graphics setting as high as possible, with V-sync and origin in-game disabled. With both games I achieved, at best, 30-50 FPS.

With the Heaven Benchmark, I had better results. The FPS dropped to 51 FPS and peaked at 65. I cannot say the same for The Evil Within and Apollo 11. In both cases the frame rate never surpassed 40.

I have updated and reverted the nvidia drivers, but that did not change anything.

Is it possible that this is a compatibility issue or were my expectations too high?

Any help would be much appreciated

 

[SubZeroFlsh]

I also have a 970 and an i5 4690K. Could you download the Valley benchmark? then I could compare with my score. Then we could tell how much your card is underperforming.

 

[napster100]

I have the 970 (EVGA model though) and i5 4690K as well... I could do a bench test if you'd want a second reference, though my card gets a bit too hot for my liking (which I'm trying to sort out) 🙁 Also I've OC'ed my CPU to 4.6GHz so that might effect it a little.

 

[Refreshed]

I too have an i5 4690k and was recently considering upping to a GTX 970 EVGA or Windforce Gigabyte. I'd be interested to hear back about your benchmarks

 

[Buchinski13]

Ran the Valley benchmark
Lowest FPS: 45
Highest FPS: 105

 

[napster100]

I too have an i5 4690k and was recently considering upping to a GTX 970 EVGA or Windforce Gigabyte. I'd be interested to hear back about your benchmarks

I wouldn't suggest the EVGA 970 (or at least the SC version) as the cooling seems rather poor... On auto fan settings, it easily reaches 80C when playing GTA V. Currently I'm having to manually set the fan curve pretty high to get the temps to a more desired 60C. I can't say much for the other models.

 

[SubZeroFlsh]

Ran the Valley benchmark
Lowest FPS: 45
Highest FPS: 105

What was your score? And average frames?

 

[napster100]

Are we running these on Extreme HD settings?

 

[napster100]

My score was

FPS: 57.4
Score: 2400
Min FPS: 5.0
Max FPS: 112.9

 

[SubZeroFlsh]

I got a score of 2693
and a average frames of 64.7

I am running on ExtremeHD and DirectX113D. Is your case well cooled? What are the temps of your motherboard, this is a good way of telling the overall temp inside of your case.

Hope this helps!

 

[napster100]

I was just posting my score as an added reference, I'm not OP lol 😀

 

[Sergeant_Sneaky]

That CPU at stock is probably bottlenecking the 970, but not by that much.
Are the temps of the GPU okay?
Also try the performance power plan in Windows.

 

[Buchinski13]

What would be the adequate temperatures?

 

[Sergeant_Sneaky]

What would be the adequate temperatures?

For a GPU, under 80c would be ideal.
For a CPU, 70c is probably the highest you'd want to run 24/7