Sli 970's with 3.5issue or GTX 980

[GET CARTER]

Alright, Sooo I have found the answer to this prior to the 3,5gb vram issuse which every single one said go 970SLI.

Now that the 3.5gb vram issue has been found, would a sli 970 still be worth it or get a single 980?

I currently own a single gtx 970 g1. I know a lot of people will say to wait for the R9 390X but to put out of the options... I purchased a rog swift and would like to use the g-sync feature.

Should I slap another 970 in there, would this work good on the 1440p with decent fps? or sell the 970 and buy a single 980?

Thanks in advance.

 

[anti-duck]

3.5GB of VRAM is ok for 1440p in my experience and 4GB of VRAM as opposed to 3.5GB isn't really going to make much difference when it comes to gaming at 1440p. I'd say go GTX 970 SLI and cross your fingers that developers start using split frame rendering with DirectX 12 and Vulkan.

 

[GET CARTER]

Well I have personally never ran into any problems yet with my single gtx 970 but I may not be doing as much or pushing it like others. I just noticed that with the rog swift my fps are much lower.. which of course is due to the 1440P. Two 970's would or should take care of that?

 

[talkischeapc9]

I traded my msi 970 sli's in for a single 980 FTW and never looked back. Don't go 970 SLI for 1440p and > The VRAM issue is very real. All the stutter FPS drops i thought were game related are completley gone in all my games. 24 out of 25 games ive tested so far all run better and smoother than on my SLI setup. the only game that performed better was Lords of the Fallen.

 

[GET CARTER]

Well in that case I will sell my 970 and get a.single 980. Thank you!

 

[chenw]

I traded my msi 970 sli's in for a single 980 FTW and never looked back. Don't go 970 SLI for 1440p and > The VRAM issue is very real. All the stutter FPS drops i thought were game related are completley gone in all my games. 24 out of 25 games ive tested so far all run better and smoother than on my SLI setup. the only game that performed better was Lords of the Fallen.

Are you sure that is not SLI induced?

I may have played a different set of games, but in my experience, most of the games I have found next to no difference between the smoothness of SLI 970 vs single 970.

980 on its own will most likely run out of raw GPU grunt power long before 970 hits its VRAM cap. EG AC:U, that game is playable at ultra setting barring AA with SLI 970's, but you will have to turn down more settings on a single 980 for that.

I run AC:U on SLI 970 and hitting just above 3.5GB threshold, the game wasn't particularly stuttery. But that could also because I have 16GB RAM, and I know a few people whose stuttering issues due to 3.5GB were largely solved.

In fact, if 970's VRAM issue is the root cause, it is another reason to NOT go 980. You won't get the same amount of performance per money spent, and given the state of things, 980 will not last much longer. At least with 970's you will have plenty of raw power for games to partially overcome that VRAM bottleneck.

My recommendation is still use SLI 970, 980 on its own lacks GPU power, and it hits the GPU power barrier a lot earlier than SLI 970's VRAM. If you still don't like 970's VRAM issue, then save the money and wait for newer gen 6GB or 8GB card, those will much less likely to hit VRAM than 980's.

 

[GET CARTER]

I traded my msi 970 sli's in for a single 980 FTW and never looked back. Don't go 970 SLI for 1440p and > The VRAM issue is very real. All the stutter FPS drops i thought were game related are completley gone in all my games. 24 out of 25 games ive tested so far all run better and smoother than on my SLI setup. the only game that performed better was Lords of the Fallen.

Are you sure that is not SLI induced?

I may have played a different set of games, but in my experience, most of the games I have found next to no difference between the smoothness of SLI 970 vs single 970.

980 on its own will most likely run out of raw GPU grunt power long before 970 hits its VRAM cap. EG AC:U, that game is playable at ultra setting barring AA with SLI 970's, but you will have to turn down more settings on a single 980 for that.

I run AC:U on SLI 970 and hitting just above 3.5GB threshold, the game wasn't particularly stuttery. But that could also because I have 16GB RAM, and I know a few people whose stuttering issues due to 3.5GB were largely solved.

In fact, if 970's VRAM issue is the root cause, it is another reason to NOT go 980. You won't get the same amount of performance per money spent, and given the state of things, 980 will not last much longer. At least with 970's you will have plenty of raw power for games to partially overcome that VRAM bottleneck.

My recommendation is still use SLI 970, 980 on its own lacks GPU power, and it hits the GPU power barrier a lot earlier than SLI 970's VRAM. If you still don't like 970's VRAM issue, then save the money and wait for newer gen 6GB or 8GB card, those will much less likely to hit VRAM than 980's.

hmmm... this does make sense and sounds good to me..

anyone else want to add any input?

 

[talkischeapc9]

Im sorry, but you can't "solve" missing hardware on a video card it doesn't have. There's a reason I got a full refund on my cards 4 months after purchasing them.


This is how you can look it. Listen to a guy defending his 970sli purchase. Or a guy that has had both. If you get a 970sli setup you will surely love it as I did since you won't know how well a 980 runs. But I really have no reason at all to lie about my experience after changing to a 980. The $200.00 difference in price that I couldn't figure out or justify when I originally went with the 970's has come to light now that I have a 980. Good luck and enjoy whatever cards you choose you will enjoy them!

Just an extra note- I ran 670ftw slis for the last 2 years previous to upgrading.

 

[j-lor]

In my opinion i prefer 970 in sli over 1 980. I had a 980 strix sold it and picked up two 970 msi gaming cards. If money's not a issue go with two 980 in sli but if it is go with two 970 in sli. Also go with the msi gaming version best card on the market quiet cool and it looks the best.

 

[talkischeapc9]

My 970s were MSI gaming. And I found them to be very heavy (they sag in the rear of the card. I actually had the power cables wire tied to support the cards because I was afraid they would warp over time. They were also extremely wide! I also found them to not look that good at all. Textured plastic.. Gross. As far as the noise levels go. Evga gigabyte and Asus have updated their BIOS to have the fans not turn on till 60-65 degrees like the MSI did first.

 

[j-lor]

My 970s were MSI gaming. And I found them to be very heavy (they sag in the rear of the card. I actually had the power cables wire tied to support the cards because I was afraid they would warp over time. They were also extremely wide! I also found them to not look that good at all. Textured plastic.. Gross. As far as the noise levels go. Evga gigabyte and Asus have updated their BIOS to have the fans not turn on till 60-65 degrees like the MSI did first.

Yeah i guess each man to their own. I love mine.

 

[chenw]

Im sorry, but you can't "solve" missing hardware on a video card it doesn't have. There's a reason I got a full refund on my cards 4 months after purchasing them.


This is how you can look it. Listen to a guy defending his 970sli purchase. Or a guy that has had both. If you get a 970sli setup you will surely love it as I did since you won't know how well a 980 runs. But I really have no reason at all to lie about my experience after changing to a 980. The $200.00 difference in price that I couldn't figure out or justify when I originally went with the 970's has come to light now that I have a 980. Good luck and enjoy whatever cards you choose you will enjoy them!

Just an extra note- I ran 670ftw slis for the last 2 years previous to upgrading.

Well here is the thing:

1. 970 does actually have 4GB VRAM, it was the segmentation that was causing the issues.
2. There were people stating that on the SLI 970's, when they were hitting the 3.5GB VRAM mark, the game suffered stuttering, but it was, for some reason, remedied when they upgraded their system RAM from 8 to 16GB. I do not know how or why it works, but it does.
3. So far the games I have played, the games were either already playable on either 970 or 980, on its own, unplayable on either due to bad coding, or unplayable on 980 and playable on SLI 970's.

Basically, my own experience had been that I know I have games that were made playable at higher settings with SLI 970 than with a single 980 would have been able to, and I have yet to find a game that was playable on a 980 but not on SLI 970's or even single 970. And this is talking 1440p.

Had 980 came with higher VRAM or if 970 was segmented into 3GB + 1GB chunk, I would be advocating 980 without question. As it stands, the issues I personally have encountered with SLI 970's were SLI related issues, not a 980 vs 970 issue.

 

[GET CARTER]

I came across a thread talking about the upping the memory to 16gb's helping it, also that nvidia just released a driver that helps it. I am just curious as to how it helps a actual hardware problem?

 

[GET CARTER]

Well I made my decision.. The 970's being more gpu raw power sounded awesome but I had to look at it as it being a hardware issue that can not be fixed. I know some people are pissed off enough not to buy from nvidia again but due to me having a g-sync monitor I do not plan to just wait and jump over to the r9 390x, sell my monitor to get a free sync etc.

I decided to go with the Asus Strix GTX 980, I was looking at the classified but for the money differences and roughly the same oc clock out of the strix I figured it was best bang for my buck.

 

[talkischeapc9]

Some more information to help clarify the memory issue/differences between the 980 & 970

970 vs 980 VRAM / Specs after Nvidia corretions

HARDWARE DIFFERENCES

ROPs
GTX 980 - 64
GTX 970 (Original) - 64
GTX 970 (Corrected) - 54

L2 Cache
GTX 980 - 2mb
GTX 970 (Original) - 2mb
GTX 970 (Corrected) - 1.75mb

The VRAM on the GTX 970 was segmented in a way it’s not on the GTX 980, with 3.5GB of the 4GB serving as one high priority segment, and the final 512MB serving as a low priority segment. The 980 uses its full 4gb as high priority. The missing hardware listed above makes the 970 unable to use the last 512mb of vram to its maximum potential. The bad part about ram is all of it operates at the slowest ram running. Just as your PC would operate if you had a 8gb stick of 2400mhz ram and installed another 8gb stick of ram but it was 1600mhz. All 16gb of ram would operate at 1600mhz. If you never actually get into the last 512mb of VRAM on the 970 you don't see the negative effects which is why most wouldn't reccomend it for systems that plan on running higher resolutions than 1080p. The fix Nvidia probably pushed into the drives is to not allow the card to exceed the 3.5gb of vram so it doesn't slow down. Of course that means you only have 3.5gb of vram. Not 4.


There's lots more you can read on how these hardware differences affect performance on this website.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8935/geforce-gtx-970-correcting-the-specs-exploring-memory-allocation

 

[talkischeapc9]

I came across a thread talking about the upping the memory to 16gb's helping it, also that nvidia just released a driver that helps it. I am just curious as to how it helps a actual hardware problem?

Increasing your RAM in your computer by *default makes windows create a larger Page File(swap file) on your HDD/SSD. Which could increase performance if you had a SSD and were playing specific games that would take advantage of page files. This has nothing to do with actually fixing the issue with the cards themselves though or making them perform better in any way.

*I say by default because allot of users do turn off their Page files now since many use 16-32gb of ram and never run out.

 

[chenw]

Some more information to help clarify the memory issue/differences between the 980 & 970

970 vs 980 VRAM / Specs after Nvidia corretions

HARDWARE DIFFERENCES

ROPs
GTX 980 - 64
GTX 970 (Original) - 64
GTX 970 (Corrected) - 54

L2 Cache
GTX 980 - 2mb
GTX 970 (Original) - 2mb
GTX 970 (Corrected) - 1.75mb

The VRAM on the GTX 970 was segmented in a way it’s not on the GTX 980, with 3.5GB of the 4GB serving as one high priority segment, and the final 512MB serving as a low priority segment. The 980 uses its full 4gb as high priority. The missing hardware listed above makes the 970 unable to use the last 512mb of vram to its maximum potential. The bad part about ram is all of it operates at the slowest ram running. Just as your PC would operate if you had a 8gb stick of 2400mhz ram and installed another 8gb stick of ram but it was 1600mhz. All 16gb of ram would operate at 1600mhz. If you never actually get into the last 512mb of VRAM on the 970 you don't see the negative effects which is why most wouldn't reccomend it for systems that plan on running higher resolutions than 1080p.


Lots more you can read on this website of how these hardware differences affect performance on this website.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8935/geforce-gtx-970-correcting-the-specs-exploring-memory-allocation

The RAM on 970 does not all operate on the same speed, if it did, 970 would run extremely slowly, and benchmarks would show that 970. The VRAM only runs that slowly when it's accessing the data in the very last 0.5GB block, and even then it still runs faster than normal system RAM.

The bottleneck only manifests itself when, as you have said, if the VRAM usage actually hits that cap, which under circumstances they do, and *this* is my main argument point of why 980 is a bad idea at the moment, as you are paying 60% premium for a negligible headroom. At 4k or 3x1080p surround, I 100% agree that 970 for those are not good ideas. under most circumstances though 970 works on 1440p without meeting the VRAM issue, though this is the highest resolution I'd go.

If I were in the market right now, I would probably settle for nothing less than 6GB VRAM, 8GB ideally.

 

[ffejster25]

DOES ANYONE HERE EVER HAVE 16GB OF RAM AND A GTX 970? IF SO DO YOU EVER HAVE PROBLEMS?

GTA 5, COD AW and DYING LIGHT all use more than 3.5 GB of VRAM when I play. as long as my RAM stays under 8GB I have no problems what so ever. I mean I am using nearly 3700 mb in most cases and I never have problems. but at certain points of the game my RAM will go passed 8gb and then that's when I have memory stuttering. only wheni go passed 8gb.

MSI AFTERBURNER program shows me the RAM and VRAM usage. I am very anal about my pc and what its doing so I always look. obviously we need 16gb of RAM now days. so far 3 games use all of your 8gb of RAM. even ghosts will sometimes when its maxed out with 4xtxaa. it always uses 3.7gb VRAM too. but never have problems. anyway I think the problem is not having enough RAM but people aren't realizing it.