Rethinking GTX 970, what else is there?

[Charybdis9]

I was really excited about getting a new 970, but with the news that just broke I am not sure if it is a good idea anymore. Honestly I don't know if the memory allocation would really even effect me; I don't really do heavy gaming on Ultra settings, but I would be running 3 screens. I mostly do things like World of Tanks, Minecraft, would consider doing BF4 or Unity (not ultra unless I could down the road) as well as the game streaming from XB1 once that is released. Should I be considered about the new things coming to light about the 970's or is it still worth the price? Other options?

Current setup:

CPU: AMD FX-8350 4.0GHz 8-Core Processor
Motherboard: ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Sport 16GB @ 1439MHz (another issue that needs to be looked into :/)
Storage: Crucial 128GB SSD
Video Card: Nvidia GTX 550 Ti 1GB GDDR5 Reference Card (Current)
Power Supply: Cooler Master M2 850W Modular

 

[iamlegend]

Consider R9 290X.

 

[TechyInAZ]

GTX 970 is fine, get it. Just read on the news too but from what they said the performance of the gtx 970 was still EXACTLY what is advertised. The news just brought some very minor misunderstanding about the GPU, that's it. Don't let that sway your choice.

 

[Robertwhyte]

a 1-3% performance decrease when using more than 3.5GB... SO MUCH FRAMES!! i mean it would be if you were running a game at like 3 million frames per second, in which case a 1-3% drop is pretty substantial!! < Major consideration!

 

[TechyInAZ]

a 1-3% performance decrease when using more than 3.5GB... SO MUCH FRAMES!! i mean it would be if you were running a game at like 3 million frames per second, in which case a 1-3% drop is pretty substantial!! < Major consideration!

LOL. Exactly.

 

[bob2004]

Its not so much the frames, people are having problems with stuttering esp with sli. It's still not a bad card for 1080p, but idk about 1440+. r9 290 and 290x looks much more attractive atm.

 

[Charybdis9]

LOL, that is a good point. The news does seem very alarmist now. All the performance reviews up to this point wont magically be reversed from new found information, especially for what I am looking at doing for the time being. Thank you for putting my mind at ease

 

[palladin9479]

If you get it then your CPU will be stuck at 800mhz, half your memory will die, your monitor will only display 640x480 and Bill Gates himself will show up and demand fealty and your first born son. The only game you'll be able to play is Pacman.


But seriously get the card, it does fine on anything you'll be playing. The only time you'll be seeing any stutter is in situations where your already at low FPS due to 16xAA Ultra 4K and other ridiculous settings for a 970. That is why it took forever for people to find out, the actual field situations where you may see stutter are so rare that people had to force the issue. And even then it's only a 3~5% loss. The only situations the stutter happens is when the card needs a resource that was stored in the last 512MB, and even then it's not random, nVidia drivers treat that last 512MB as sort of a cache, it only places data there that hasn't been used in a long time. If it predicts that your going to need the data sooner rather then later it will try to move the data into the first 3.5GB range.

The whole situation has been vastly overblown.