4K on a budget: the GTX 970 experiment

[Sweepr]

Can Nvidia's now-discontinued GeForce GTX 970 successfully power a 4K ultra HD display on a range of challenging PC games? On the face of it, the notion sounds ludicrous - on a specs level we're severely constrained by memory capacity, bandwidth and of course, basic compute power. But consider this: the prices of 4K monitors and TVs are dropping like a stone, but relatively speaking, graphics hardware is holding its price. On a general level, we need more from our graphics hardware, and the GTX 970 is an excellent subject for our tests to see just how far mainstream GPUs can be pushed.

The choice of this particular video card is not coincidental. The GTX 970 is a sales phenomenon to the point where even though it was removed from sale some time ago, it's still the second most popular GPU in the Steam hardware survey, just ahead of its effective Pascal replacement, the GTX 1060. Overclock the GTX 970 and as long you're not bogged down by sub-optimal drivers, or held back by its lower memory allocation, its ballpark performance is on par with the 1060. Automatically, our test results here will apply to around 10.5 per cent of the current PC gaming market.

www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-4k-on-a-budget-the-gtx-970-experiment

 

[alcoholbob]

With the 970 its hard because of 3.5GB of RAM and the biggest gain to image quality is high quality textures. I mean 99% of the image quality at 4K is just maxing out texture detail, and a lower end card can pull it off for sure, but I think 6GB should be minimum to avoid stuttering at 4K.

 

[ZGR]

I gamed at 4k 40-60fps on an R9 290 for about a year. It is absolutely doable if you set appropriate settings and play older games.

The GPU requirements for 4k is often exaggerated. My 1070 does all games at 4k really well. This is why I am so excited for 4k144hz as I think the 1080 ti is ready for 4k144hz at low settings.

 

[Ancalagon44]

I use my RX480 4GB at 4K. It fine in older games, when I tried Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, I could tell the framerate was a little choppy.

But games from 2015 and older work just fine in 4K. I loaded up Tomb Raider 2013, my benchmark results were for 4K high detail were 60FPS.